Impoliteness outside Literature: The Colloquium Harleianum

This chapter investigates impoliteness in subliterary texts, namely in bilingual teaching material for learning languages. It takes the Colloquium Harleianum, one of the conversation manuals in the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana (second to third century CE) as a corpus. The chapter studies both impoliteness forms and their evaluations from culture-internal speakers. The impoliteness forms, the metalanguage and the metapragmatic comments on the quarrel represented in this corpus are compared with quarrels represented in literary texts, mainly Roman Comedy (second to third century BCE) and the novel (second cetury CE). It relies on metapragmatic comments as the main entry to the emic evaluations of impoliteness forms and of offences present in the corpus. In this way, the chapter provides a diachronic perspective on ancient impoliteness in Latin by taking into account both literary and subliterary evidence. By dealing with teaching manuals, it provides a unique contribution on pragmatic competence for non-native speakers, and it offers insights on the etiquette norms for the elite, which is the perspective that the evidences in the corpus reflect.