The full range of internal dialect divisions within Indo-European that Albanian potentially enters into are surveyed here and shown to be complex and multifaceted. Nonetheless, it is argued that the overall evidence, based on the criterion of significant shared innovations, points to a particularly close connection between Albanian and Greek. It is further argued that this connection constitutes a subdivision within a discernible Palaeo-Balkanic subgroup that includes Messapic, Phrygian, and Armenian and possibly other fragmentarily known languages. This qualitative assessment of how Albanian fits in dialectally within the larger family matches results reported from computational phylogenetic investigation.

The range of traditional cladistic analysis can be extended greatly with computational methods, but it is necessary to understand how those methods work and what they can and cannot tell us about the diversification of language families. This chapter explores those possibilities and their limits.

This chapter shows how scholars have both justified, and argued against, the subgrouping of Indo-European in the history of the discipline and sets out the justifications given for methodological choices made by researchers. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been generally agreed that the best supporting evidence for reconstructing a subgroup comprising two or more languages is the presence of non-trivial linguistic innovations which have taken place in common during their prehistory, innovations which were not shared by other languages in the same family. This chapter addresses questions which arise out of this methodology, including whether all shared linguistics innovations should be given equal weight in the assessment of possible subgroups, and whether it is possible to reconstruct dialectal variation in a proto-language.

Im/Politeness Research is already a well stablished research field which offers interesting insights for the analysis of Ancient Greek and Latin texts, and the interpersonal dynamics of the societies that spoke those languages throughout time. This chapter gives a broad and accesible overview of the history of Im/Politeness Research, including its origins, the main stages of its development, its key concepts and methods and the current research trends. It also discusses the tools of Conversation Analysis and their possible contribution to our understanding of im/politeness, includuing the ways this methodology can help to extend the scope of study. Special emphasis is also given to the particular problems faced by classicists when examining im/politeness phenomena in ancient languages, and the ways to overcome those issues with the help of suitable methodologies. Finally, the chapter presents the structure and contents of the rest of the volume.

Ancient Greek does not have a term equivalent to ‘please’ and the bare imperative is used for requests. The understanding of Ancient Greek can benefit from a comparison with some modern languages where the equivalent to ‘please’ is either more restricted in use (Modern Greek) or absent (Danish): these two languages have different strategies (diminutives for Modern Greek, particles for Danish) in the case of routine interactions where the aim is to signal to the interlocutor that the request is expected in the context.

The aim of the chapter is to evaluate the role of the particle δή in such a function of de-dramatization and trivialization of the potentially threatening speech act, through a corpus study in dialogical texts of the classical period (comedies of Aristophanes, philosophical dialogues of Plato). The study shows that this post-positive particle can function as a positive politeness marker (in Brown and Levinson’s sense), to signal a weakly threatening or expected request in the context.

The chapter sets out to query ancient scholars’ awareness of politeness phenomena as reflected in language and the metalinguistic tools they used to describe them. Particular attention is devoted to the terms charientismos and astimos, as well as to some specific acceptations of reticentia and expressions like grave or durum dictu.

Even if as a general rule ancient grammarians and commentators did not analyse the ordinary spoken language, since they mostly focused on poetry and the more exalted prose genres, it can be argued that all commentators of literary texts pay some considerable attention to ordinary language in interaction, and some attempt is made by them at identifying and labelling what they correctly see as speakers’ rhetorical strategies to reach a pragmatic goal while avoiding conflicts with an interlocutor or giving offence. These writers also make interesting deductions about the social and educational implications of the correct use of politeness etiquette and ritualization.

The author examines how commands and requests are expressed in a corpus of Greek and Latin literature, in order to show how the politeness systems of ancient Greek and Latin may have differed.

The chapter uses the dialogues of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence) to examine the correlation between the characters’ perception of im/politeness and the practice of interrupting. By adopting the methods of Conversation Analysis, the study sets out criteria to distinguish interruptions from other non-hostile or non-salient types of interventions in a dramatic text without explicit stage directions. According to the main argument, proper interruptions – just like impolite behaviour – are constructed interactionally and their identification depends on how the affected party reacts to someone invading their speaking turn. The analysis of face work in various types of turn-taking incidents, either collaborative or disruptive and antagonistic, helps to justify why given talk is not handled as an interruption. After comparing some qualitative and quantitative data, the chapter shows that there are many examples of face-threatening and hostile interventions in the comedy corpus that cannot be analysed as interruptions but rather should be associated with the type of interaction (e.g. conflictual talk) or the speaker’s dominant position within.