How to assess politeness in response to impoliteness: some examples from Latin comedy

Abstract

This chapter aims to contribute to the historical pragmatic research in Latin through a study of conflictual communication in im/politeness perspective. More specifically, it focuses on impolite and overpolite expressions in confrontations, as two different but related linguistic resources displayed in conflict.The corpus used consists of the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and Donatus' commentaries as source for metapragmatic comments, in order to elucidate ancient evaluation on im/polite phenomena. The results show how power is reflected in speakers' choices, when they are involved in face-attack interactions.