Politeness strategies in Homer's Odyssey

The main goal of my thesis will be to study politeness strategies in supplications in Homer’s Odyssey. Taking my cue from the most influential theory of politeness (Brown& Levinson (1978; 1987), I will conceive politeness as the redressing of potential affronts towards the addressee’s face caused by face-threatening acts, such as requests. Whereas supplication scenes in the Iliad seem to conform to a more or less standardized pattern, supplications in Odyssey appear to diverge quite widely: both the number of ‘moves’ that are made in order to prevent the addressee’s loss of face, and the lengths to which these moves are elaborated, differ considerably from case to case. My aim is to shed light on the factors that determine the choice between very elaborate, indirect forms of supplication (some of which clearly seem to violate the Gricean maxims of efficient communication) and shorter, more direct ones. Using Naiden’s (2006) description of the stages of the act of supplication, I will focus exclusively on the verbal expression of the supplication. I will distinguish between prayers and supplications, and concentrate only on the latter. In each supplication I will distinguish the core request from the supportive moves which precede or follow it, and modify its force. These supportive moves will be categorized under specific labels in relation to whether they mitigate or aggravate the force of each supplication. In order to do that, I will apply the CCSARP coding manual as proposed by Blum-Kulka (1989), with certain modifications that are made necessary by the particularities of epic conversation. The aim of studying the moves that support supplications is to see in what types of situations Odyssean characters feel the need for very elaborate politeness strategies. The study of these phenomena will help us to see what speakers in Epic discourse do to avoid that their addressees lose ‘face’