Litigare in tragedia: per una pragmatica del conflitto

This paper offers a pragmatic analysis of quarrels in Roman Tragedy. Its aim is to study this kind of conflictual interactions from a pragmatic perspective, and to compare tragic quarrels with quarrels in Roman Comedy and Novel, object of a previous study. The theoretical approach situated in the realm of im/politeness theories allows to describe the linguistic forms used in quarrels, and provides a coherent framework to study impoliteness in Latin, delineating patterns of behaviour through different literary genres across a wide time span. This paper offers a further step in this direction.