Introduction

This book assembles selected papers from a conference entitled Doing things with words on stage. Pragmatics and its use in ancient drama, which was held at the University of Zurich from 4th to 7th July 2018. The conference brought together scholars who, in their work, use the heuristic potential of interpersonal pragmatics, i.e. the systematic and theoretically informed study of communicative interaction. Rather than following a single approach or creating a uniform picture of the objects and objectives of pragmatic analysis, however, their contributions illustrate the breadth of the discipline and show the many different forms that engagement with the pragmatic dimension of literary texts can take: from the force that a single word can have in referring to its intra- and extratextual context to the back and forth in conversations; from the purely linguistic resources of communication to the interplay of verbal and non-verbal forms of interaction and to the grounding of communicative acts in social structures and norms of conduct. In other words, this volume offers a panoramic view that illustrates the continuum of pragmatic phenomena by which meaning is constructed: from lingual to non-lingual forms of interaction, or as it were, from ‘doing things with words’ to ‘making statements without words’. As each author contributes their unique perspective, this volume demonstrates the different opportunities that pragmatic work on interaction in literature affords, and it aims to stimulate the exchange between the different branches of pragmatics to create synergies and thereby further advance the study of the field.