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Impoliteness in Plautus’ comedies by Sophie Roesch is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Impoliteness in Plautus’ comedies about?

Linguistic impoliteness, defined as an intentional face attack by a speaker on an addressee, is a well-documented phenomenon in Latin comedy. Rudeness between characters is indeed a recurrent feature of the entertainment provided for audiences and Plautus makes extensive use of it; in addition to being an easy way of making audiences laugh, it is also very effective as a means of advancing the plot. It also allows the playwright to demonstrate his wit and verbal creativity, for example through uerbiuelitationes (i.e. insult escalation) between characters. Furthermore, the saturnalian disruption of the usual social hierarchy calls for impoliteness, since face attack is a way for inferior lower social ranks to show that they may for a short time gain the upper hand on their former superiors by belittling them. There are two rudeness strategies which appear to be hallmarks of Plautine comedies: creative insults and willful ignorance of the requirements of social etiquette (especially regarding opening and closing phases of dialogues). Most of the impoliteness strategies evident in Plautine comedies are still used in our contemporary societies (see Culpeper 1996; Bousfield 2008a), so i

Author

Sophie Roesch

Publisher

de Gruyter GmbH, Walter

Published

2019

Language

EN

ISBN

9783110678291

Subjects

Literary Criticism, Language Learning, Literary Fiction