Although there has been considerable interest over time in the composition of narrative sections of the Homeric epics, there have been very few studies of the composition of the speeches and exchanges of speech that Homer depicts in his songs. This book attempts to redress the balance. Drawing on research in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive psychology, the book considers the speeches in Homer from two perspectives, as cognitive and as social phenomena. Part I explores the role of memory in the generation of Homer's speech forms; and the relationship between Homeric voices an ... More

Although there has been considerable interest over time in the composition of narrative sections of the Homeric epics, there have been very few studies of the composition of the speeches and exchanges of speech that Homer depicts in his songs. This book attempts to redress the balance. Drawing on research in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive psychology, the book considers the speeches in Homer from two perspectives, as cognitive and as social phenomena. Part I explores the role of memory in the generation of Homer's speech forms; and the relationship between Homeric voices and the speech of the poet's everyday world. It is suggested that speech acts such as rebukes and the declining of invitations, and question forms and the pattern of hysteron-proteron so familiar to us in Homer, have their origins in pre-patterned forms of everyday speech; and that even the discourse strategies that underpin Homeric questions are recognizable to us from everyday talk. Part II formulates responses to the question of whether Homer reveals consistent differences in his representation of men's and women's talk. Men's and women's speech-habits are examined in order to detect whether there is a male preference for speech acts such as rebukes (a dominant mode) and a female preference for protests (a co-operative mode); and whether the use of information questions, directives, interruption, and even storytelling content and style can be identified with men's and women's different speaking styles. The absence of clearcut and consistent findings on this question does not diminish the value of the original question.