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moves may be few or many, predictable or unpredictable, brief and simple or long and complex. To know that a certain move counts as an offer or a response, we may have to be intimately familiar with the situation, the relationship, and details of the conversational conventions already established between the two individuals. |
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How does this apply to classical love poetry? We cannot necessarily identify a genre based on grammatical or lexical features of the move, even if some such features do seem closely associated with a given move. And the less context we have, the more difficult it may be to identify moves. Moreover, as I have suggested, disguising the move by expressing it indirectly, by irony, metaphor, or any number of "stylistic devices" seems to have been an important objective for most Greek and Latin love poets. To identify the move in a poem is not to "solve the problem of meaning", but merely to recognize the basic communicative force of a kind of utterance. Any analyst who misses, mistakes or overlooks the move is failing in one of his main responsibilities. |
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Hence the importance of studying a set of poems representing the same move and also of seeing that a given move may be made by a variety of speech-acts. A genre (if we are to use this word in speaking of classical love poetry) corresponds to a move and not necessarily to a speech-act. A move may be expressed by a variety of speech-acts, and the speech-act by which a move is articulated, even if it includes recognizable lexical elements, may undergo unpredictable if fully comprehensible morphological and syntactic transformations. |
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A comparative and historical pragmatics of the European love poem would do well to begin with Greek and Latin, but its scope must be much broader. It should describe over time and across languages who played what games, in what contexts, by what rules (however flexible), what moves were possible and how they were made. Making peace between lovers is one such game. It can be played silently in bed.41 We have seen here that it can also be played with wit and pragmatic know-how on the Plautine stage. |
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41 In the Ars Amatoria (2.433466) Ovid prays to be the victim of a violent attack of (justified) jealousy, and advises his readers how to make peace quickly (I paraphrase): put your arms around her neck, and let her weep into your chest, give her kisses as she cries, give her the joys of Venus as she weeps (457459): pax erit; hoc uno soluitur ira modo ("there will be peace; that's the only way wrath can be melted" 460). Once she's had her full of rage, take her to bed: she'll soften up (461462). illic depositis habitat Concordia telis, / illic, crede mihi, Gratia nata loco est ("There, when the arms have been laid down, Harmony shall dwell; there, believe me, Forgiveness is born" 463464). Note the language we have learned in Plautus: pax, ira, concordia, gratia. |
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