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Title:
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Aeschylean stylistics: A study of linguistic variation
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Author:
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Timothy Allison
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Michigan
, Department of Classical Studies
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Degree Date:
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2003
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Sociolinguistics
Text/Corpus Linguistics
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Subject Language(s):
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Greek, Ancient
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Director(s):
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Ruth Scodel
Dragomir Radev
Benjamin Acosta-Hughes
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Abstract:
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This dissertation applies methods from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics to the task of determining what aspects of Aeschylean style were part of the random 'Kunstsprache', and which were used for stylistic effect. Specifically, I investigate the distribution of -ois/-oisi, and find that the nurse has a statistically significant low rate of the long form, while Apollo has a significantly high rate of the long form. I find that postponed prepositions occur at a much higher rate in the 'Persians' than in Aeschylus' other plays, which suggests that this phenomenon carried some stylistic weight and was manipulated for style. I show how the historic present is used in characterization: characters who tend to use it in abundance are closer to the story they tell. I study distributions of resolutions in Aeschylus and find that in the 'Suppliants' and 'Oresteia' they tend to cluster in scenes which anticipate events which will occur on stage. I measure Yule's K in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Homer, and I show that the 'Prometheus' has a higher lexical diversity than the other plays. I also apply the cosine measure to show that there is a greater difference between male and female speech than we would expect at random, and I show that over the course of Aeschylus' career, his plays become more Sophoclean and less Homeric. By this measure, the 'Prometheus' is much less like Aeschylus' other plays and about as much like Aeschylus' other plays as a random passage from Sophocles is. By applying a technique from corpus linguistics, I show which words best distinguish male from female speech and messenger speech from other trimeter language. I also discuss results from a distributional study of conjunctions and negatives. I include in an Appendix, a list of words which best distinguish Aeschylus' language from Homer's and Sophocles'.
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