How to be impolite in ancient Greek: silencers and dismissals in Greek comedy

Abstract

This paper examines impoliteness in ancient Greek, taking into account the linguistic structure of silencers and dismissals, their communicative functions and their gender distribution in three comedies by Aristophanes. Silencers and dismissals serve a number of different communicative goals: reinforcing disagreement, creating comic effect, and advancing the plot. We will analyse the possibilities that speakers have at their disposal to express them, and the interference that occurs with other speech acts that are conceptualised in a similar way.