Marche linguistiche della soggettività nelle lettere private in latino

This study focuses on the linguistic means that speakers (or rather writers) employed to express their subjectivity in a Latin epistolary corpus (II A.D.). Private letters, and particularly the Tiberianus archive which is the focus of this analysis, constitute a privileged genre to undertake an analysis of linguistic elements that express subjectivity. Letters convey intimate emotional themes, personal points of view on events, feelings and concerns. Such wide range of topics is expressed through pragmatic functions that are encoded on the linguistic level by markers of subjectivity, i.e. linguistic elements that the writer employs to construct, negotiate, modulate, redefine and convey his own identity, opinions, relations with the interlocutor, together with his personal attitude towards the message. Moving from the analysis of the letters contained in the corpus Tiberianus, this study aims at defining different classes of markers of subjectivity, taking into consideration pragmaticalised units as the attention getter scis ‘you know’, hedges as vide si potes ‘see if you can’, or courtesy markers as rogo ‘I pray’. As the analysis of the repertoire of forms identified will show, the identity of the speaker is established or negotiated through a series of strategies that go beyond the use of referential linguistic expressions, projecting this identity at the level of organization of discourse in key communicative and complex interactional dynamics.