PRAGL · Pragmatics of Archaic Greek Literature
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2005-09-01 → 2008-08-31
- EU contribution
- €237,148
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- OIF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners. CORDIS does not always give exact coordinates for projects before 2014. These points are placed at city or country level.
Results in brief
Final Activity Report Summary - PRAGL (Pragmatics of Archaic Greek Literature)
PRAGL was an interdisciplinary project that was very successfully carried out throughout the outgoing as well as the returning phase of the fellowship. The basic aim was to apply principles, theoretical models and frameworks form pragmatics, in combination with elements from sociolinguistics, cognitive psychology and anthropology, to the textual analyses of different ancient Greek literary pieces. The basic scientific achievement was the production of innovative views and readings that were proposed in several conferences and scientific meetings and were collected in a monograph. The main subject of the analyses was the Homeric poems, of about 28 000 lines, which represented the crucial starting point for not only ancient Greek literature, but also for any grammar of ancient Greek language. The initial presupposition on the relevance of different pragmatic aspects, such as the speaker's communicative intentions and the contribution of the context of the utterances, led the fellow to identify a number of linguistic features whose functions and meanings could not only be enriched, but even redefined. The linguistic features which were mostly analysed were different kinds of third person pronouns and particles. The research and the results related to the project provided fresh theoretical impulse and strong evidence concerning the discourse functions and the pragmatic meanings of the words in question and were much beyond the initial expectations. The selected approach revealed that a considerable amount of further work could potentially be done on the chosen corpus in the future. In this sense, the project laid the foundations for an overall alternative perspective within which to read any sentence of early Greek poetry.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Pragmatics of Archaic Greek Literature" (PRAGL) is a project whose aim is to apply principles, theoretical models and frameworks of contemporary Linguistics (Pragmatics in particular) to the first literary production of ancient Greece. This production mostly consists of enormously famous texts such as, e. g. the Iliad, the Odyssey, and early tragedies. The research field is intrinsically interdisciplinary, since it combines elements from Sociolinguistics, Cognitive Psychology and Anthropology, beside Pragmatics and Literature. The corpus of texts being selected is particularly suitable for the proposed linguistic analysis, because it consists of the written version of something conceived to be orally performed. This fact influences enormously the language used, the word order, the deictic reference system, the meaning of particles, and so on. Despite of our modern temptation to admire the high significance of this important part of European literature as the result of a 'written' mastery, archaic poetry or prose, dramatic or non-dramatic texts owe their expressivity rather to an `oral¿ mastery. In fact, they share "more than one would think" different pragmatic features, i.e., features revealing something of the situational context of the utterance, or of the relationship between the speaker and his audience, or of the speaker's attitude towards what is said. In the face of historical and current debates on orality in ancient Greece, the scientific contribution of this project is to product a first systematic account of actual linguistic choices and grammatical constructions being orally functional to a successful communication within the archaic Greek culture. This account consists of defining the pragmatic function of such linguistic choices; the result hoped for is to definitely show, through a linguistic analytic investigation, how ancient Greek texts from Eight century to half Fifth century B. C. were orally effective."
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI DI TORINO - DIPARTIMENTO DI PSICOLOGIA · TORINOCoordinatorCity levelItaly
- HARVARD UNIVERSITY · CAMBRIDGE, MACity levelUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union