Greeting in Roman comedy: register and (im)politeness

Abstract This article investigates multiple pragmatic facets of Latin greeting as depicted in the corpus of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence). To this end, different frameworks are combined, including Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory, and the most prominent (Im)politeness Theories. The complexity of the greeting phenomenon is first demonstrated by identifying its position inside the opening section of the dialogue with possible reductions, elaborations, and substitutions. Thus a heterogeneous group of greeting tokens is retrieved from the comedy corpus, which, furthermore, fit the speech-act theoretical description of the greeting as a behabitative (Austin), expressive act (Searle) or acknowledgment (Bach and Harnish). Moreover, the paper briefly signalizes the contact-oriented (phatic) functions of the salutation ritual as access display (Shiffrin) or its use as a mechanism of (re)producing the social order (Schegloff). The main part of the investigation, however, is devoted to the greeting formulae and their linguistic variation in Plautus and Terence. After briefly presenting the classical model of (im)politeness (Brown and Levinson), the paper relates the speech-act formulation of the expressions to positive- or negative-politeness strategies. Finally, the article applies the frame-based analysis of the politeness’ formulaic language, as proposed by Terkourafi. The dialogue openings are classified according to their broader extralinguistic context (e.g. participants, temporal setting, the reason for the encounter) into several situational frames. In the last section of the paper, the (im)politeness value of the greeting expressions is revised in relation to their adequacy to a given situation type. In result, some instances of using the formulae inappropriately (i.e., out of frame) are given, which demonstrate the complex interpersonal dynamics of the verbal interaction depicted by Plautus and Terence.