Scholarship on the rapid dialogue of Attic tragedy mostly focused on form and structure, overlooking language and the relationships between the characters. This book redresses the imbalance by deploying under-explored methodologies from pragmatics and sociolinguistics: Brown and Levinson’s politeness model, Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Speech Act Theory, Conversation Analysis. Sophocles’ dialogues, with their unrivalled linguistic precision, prove an invaluable corpus for this analysis. After a methodological survey, the book explores the realizations of politeness super-strategies...