Exploring diachronic variation in discernment politeness in Ancient Egyptian

Ridealgh, Kim ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1051-2339 and Almansa Villatoro, M. Victoria (2024) Exploring diachronic variation in discernment politeness in Ancient Egyptian. Journal of Historical Pragmatics. ISSN 1566-5852

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Abstract

In this paper, we investigate evidence of diachronic variation in patterns of Discernment Politeness in letters written in the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom (c. 2300–2200 bce) and Late Ramesside period (c. 1099–1069 bce). We present examples of requests, information acts and honorifics used in these letters, predominantly those letters sent by subordinates to their superiors, to explore how this relationship dynamic is linguistically indexed. Our evidence shows that throughout the Old and New Kingdoms, communicative acts were regulated by behavioural norms dependent on power structures rather than individual volition, with Power being the most dominant social variable. Finally, we argue that Discernment is a key approach for exploring politeness in texts from ancient Egypt, supporting current research on the topic, and that the approach used here for the ancient Egyptian material has wider applicability for diachronic linguistic analyses of remote civilisations which are highly hierarchical.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies (former - to 2024)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Language and Communication Studies Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Area Studies
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	06 Aug 2024 12:30
Last Modified:	12 Aug 2024 09:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96163
DOI:

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