Scholarship on the rapid dialogue of Attic tragedy mostly focused on form and structure, overlooking language and the relationships between the characters. This book redresses the imbalance by deploying under-explored methodologies from pragmatics and sociolinguistics: Brown and Levinson's politeness model, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Speech Act Theory, Conversation Analysis. Sophocles' dialogues, with their unrivalled linguistic precision, prove an invaluable corpus for this analysis.

After a methodological survey, the book explores the realizations of politeness super-strategies in Sophocles: "bald-on-record" exploits clarity, conciseness and frankness; "positive politeness" indicates affection, agreement, common ground and cooperation; "negative politeness" communicates distance, mitigation, deference, non-imposition, self-effacement; "off-record" manipulates discursive relevance, informational accuracy, sincerity and transparency, while promoting allusiveness, irony, ambiguity, vagueness, and figurative language.

Scholars and students of Greek and Roman literature, linguistics and theatre studies will take advantage of the variety of linguistic facts investigated and of the general interpretation of Sophocles proposed.