Reference at play in Ancient Greek drama – DramaRef

The project DramaRef aims at studying the system of demonstrative pronouns and adjectives in Ancient Greek drama from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, in order to identify the linguistic and pragmatic factors triggering the choice of each marker. While the rich system of demonstratives in archaic and classical Greek has been explored in studies limited to a narrow corpus, the novel approach we are taking here is to establish an exhaustive corpus of those markers (in the tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and the comedies by Aristophanes and Menander, along with the numerous fragments), available in open access, and searchable according to a vast array of criteria. Due to their characteristics, the classical dramatic texts are a wonderful domain to study the use of demonstratives in a concrete pragmatic situation, namely the performance on stage. During the second phase, we will use this dataset to approach the system of demonstrative by different angles: referent tracking in discourse, syntax, interaction with information structure, demonstrative reinforcement, propositional anaphors, non-standard anaphors, dramaturgy, diachrony. The third phase will be the moment of gathering the results, through an international conference and the publication of a collective book.