Anna
BONIFAZI The communicative usages of au,
aute, autis and autar in Homer
The
pragmatic analysis of particles and, partly, adverbs in
early Greek poetry allows for highlighting what in
different contexts the speaker wants to convey by means
of their utterance, more than what is the fixed meaning
of the words.
Homeric
au, aute, autis
and autar are to be
considered as multifunctional markers, whose basic goal
affects meta-communication more than information on
states of affair. Despite their canonical definitions, as
mainly adversative or continuative adverbs, their
meanings (sometimes difficult to be classified, according
to traditional grammatical categories) are relevant to
orienting the audience about certain intentions of the
speaker. The communicative usages of au, aute,
autis and autar
in the Iliad, in the Odyssey and in the
Homeric Hymns are seen as related to the functions to let
the audience know both the procedural meaning of
discourse (signals conveying something like “and
now there is a new narrative section” or “shift
your eyes onto this other object”) and
views/attitudes to be interactionally
shared by speaker and listeners (signals conveying
something like “this is a well-known returning
event” or “by saying this I recognize a
special identity”). These functions are both
conveyed by the common etymological root au and
can be summarized in two words: distinctiveness and
recognition. Some markers mainly convey distinctiveness
(e. g. autar) and some
others mainly recognition (e. g.
autis).
The different sub-functions being identified are the
following: with respect to distinctiveness, to point out
either thematic spatio-temporal
separation or visual prominence (e. g. the formular
autar epeita
and Od. 4, 130 respectively);
to mark a visual shift from an item to another (e. g. the
turn-taking formula ton (tēn)
d’aute proseeipe);
to convey an argumentative contrast (e. g. ei
d’au in the Odyssey); with
respect to recognition, to mark an event as returning (e.
g. Hymn V to Aphrodite, 277); to point out acts of
recognition (e. g. Il. 8, 446); to signal the
acknowledgement of surprise or wonder by the speaker (e.
g. Od. 11, 93).
It
is argued that autos, autika
and autōs share the
same basic pragmatic functions, i.
e. to convey distinctiveness and recognition.
Although
some usages of atar
are
overlapping with those of autar,
atar is interpreted as a mark of
frustration of expectation, like Lat. at;
therefore, the difference in their pragmatic usages seems
to refer to the respective etymological IE roots, namely
*au- and *át.
Anna.Bonifazi@lett.unitn.it