| This is a study of the basic processes of interpretation employed when an audience encounters etymological wordplay in Latin poetry. Determining the logical structure of wordplay detection increases the rigor with which Latin wordplay, and its curious parallels in Roman grammatical sources, can be described. The study proceeds by examining a corpus of etymological wordplays, primarily in Ovid's Metamorphoses, the poems of Tibullus, and Vergil's Aeneid, in the light of modern semantics and pragmatics.;Ancient etymology, as practiced in grammatical sources like Varro's De Lingua Latina, operates according to principles of meaning, and these principles set up a pattern of expectations that both a poet and an audience can draw on in interpreting texts. The relationship between poetic diction and etymological texts can therefore be explored by asking what steps the audience must take to recover the minimum components of an etymological argument from the suggestions that a poem makes. These steps constitute the structure of the wordplay. This dissertation offers detailed analyses of the structures of wordplays and uses these structural determinations to suggest ways that wordplay can be incorporated into the wider themes of each poem. Determining the structures of various etymological wordplays allows some new patterns to be discerned in their poems. For example, less complex wordplays tend to precede more complex wordplays in sequential reading or listening. The structural approach to wordplay developed here also relates wordplay types to one another, and to broader features of communication, such as abductive reasoning, and thereby offers some advantages over previous typological efforts. |
