Problemi di actio nell’oratoria greca: le interrogative totali, fra logografo e cliente

Alessandro Vatri



Abstract:

In Ancient Greek, the distinction between yes/no questions and simple statements need not be marked by anything other than the interrogation mark (;) in writing and interrogative intonation in pronunciation. However, the interrogation mark was only introduced into Greek orthography in the Byzantine period, which suggests that yes/no questions may have been difficult to identify for readers of earlier written texts. This might have been the case for clients of Attic logographers, who needed to recognize which sentences were to be pronounced as questions in preparation for oral delivery.
This article examines potentially ambiguous yes/no questions in the logographic speeches of Lysias and Antiphon and discusses what contextual clues were available to their clients for disambiguation.

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