Some linguistic and pragmatic remarks on the tabellae defixionum

Abstract The present paper is devoted to the linguistic analysis of the tabellae defixionum, envisaging in particular some syntactic and semantic traits that might be considered as crucial for the analysis and interpretation of the curse tablets. In the first part, a basic description of the tabellae defixionum as to their historical and cultural context is provided; in the second part, cursing is analyzed according to the speech act theory; and in the third part some relevant features of the variety of Latin used are discussed, especially modality – the usage of the subjunctive mood and the semantics of the verb posse. Additional comments are given on the usage of negation, deixis and quantification.