Conversational Behaviour after Quarrels: Im/politeness in Latin Dialogues

This paper intends to analyse conversational behaviour after quarrels in Latin literary texts.Taking the quarrels in Roman Comedy, Tragedy, and Novels (3rd–2nd BCE–1st–2nd CE) as a corpus, this analysis focuses on the consequences of these conflicts from an interactional and linguistic perspective. The items under investigation include the types of conversation that occur after quarrels – whether conflictual or not; its structure – in terms of openings and closings; and the interpersonal rela-tions between the interlocutors who participate in the fight – whether the quarrel changes their former relation, and how.In tackling such questions, Conversational Analysis and im/politeness theories serve to elucidate the use and distribution of the expressions used by the interloc-utors. The results of the analysis show that the trends for conflictual interactions differ from those of nonconflictual ones. The type of conversation thus impacts conversational behaviours and expectations. This suggests that the conception of standards according to the type of conversation reflects a more accurate grasp of the reality reflected in the texts.