Toward a Historical Sociolinguistic Poetics of Medieval Greek ... Civilization, 12)

About this book

This volume collects some of the papers presented at two international conferences, held in Vienna, on historical sociolinguistics and late Byzantine historiography. How can historical sociolinguistic analyses of Medieval Greek aid the interpretation of Medieval Greek texts? This is the main question that the papers collected in this volume aim to address. The term "historical sociolinguistics" (HSL), a discipline that combines linguistic, social, historical, and philological sciences, suggests that a language cannot be studied without its social dimension. Similarly, the study of a language in its social dimension is nothing else than the study of the communication which takes place between members of a given speech community by the means of written texts. These are seen as sets of shared "signs" used by authors to communicate to their audiences. This volume is divided into two distinct parts. In the first, Cuomo's and Bentein's papers aim to offer an overview on the discipline and examples of applied HSL. Valente's, Bianconi's, and Pérez-Martín's papers will then show how to study the "context of production and reception" of Byzantine texts. These are followed by Horrocks' study on some features of Atticized Medieval Greek. In the second part, the contributions by Telelis, Odorico, and Manolova focus on the context of reception of the texts by Georgios Pachymeres, Theodoros Pediasimos, and Nikephoros Gregoras respectively.