Greek request verbs across time: Politeness in the documentary papyri

Ancient Greek shows different strategies for expressing a speech act of request. One of the most recurring strategies consists of using a request verb followed by a structure that expresses the content of the request – in other words, what the speaker would like the addressee to perform. Various factors influence how to make a request, in particular, the relationship between the speaker/writer and the hearer/reader and the context in which the speech act is performed. The main contribution of the present chapter is a diachronic as well as a synchronic analysis that focuses on different stages of Greek (i.e., Classical and Postclassical Greek), which is one of the best-attested ancient Indo-European languages. The investigation integrates data from documentary papyri into the analysis of literary sources, to which scholarly research has usually be devoted. Documentary papyri provide evidence of the Greek language with a continuity of more than a millennium (4th century BC – 8th century CE) and reflect language usages that are more oriented toward everyday communicational purposes rather than adhering to literary conventions and genre constraints. For this reason, they are fruitful sources for exploring strategies adopted to make a request and language choices with respect to politeness constraints. The chapter focuses on different request strategies related to the usage of the verbs aitéō, axióō, déomai, iketéuō, erōtáō, and parakaléō. It provides an explanation of the semantic shifts of the verbs axióō and déomai between the Classical and the Postclassical periods, considering issues of conventionalization and pragmatic associations. In this respect, it addresses the usage of both verbs in petitions to the king and to officials using a frame-based approach to politeness. Furthermore, the chapter draws some observations regarding the distribution of request verbs in their performative use throughout the corpus of documentary papyri, providing a synchronic analysis of their syntactic patterns and pointing out their differences with respect to the context of usage in which they occur. There fore, it investigates how politeness is conveyed and considers the usage of erōtáō and parakaléō with the unsoftened imperative in private letters.