Greek Forms Of Address ' From Herodotus To Lucian ' Hardcover

Eleanor Dickey

How did an Athenian citizen address his wife? His children, his slaves, and his dog? How did they address him? This book is the first major application of linguistic theories of address to an ancient language. It is based on a corpus of 11,891 vocatives from twenty-five prose authors from Herodotus to Lucian, and on comparative data from Aristophanes, Menander, and other sources; the data are analysed using techniques and evidence from the field of sociolinguistics to shed light on some long-standing problems in Greek. A separate section discusses the theoretical problems which arise from the attempt to reconstruct conversational Greek on the basis of written texts and concludes that this

0198150547

9780198150541

English

OUP Oxford

23-Dec-11

360