Towards a Redefinition of ‘Context’. Some Remarks on Methodology regarding Historical Sociolinguistics and Texts of Antiquity

In research on written documents of Antiquity – especially inscriptions – it is not uncommon to work with corpora comprising an extremely limited amount of text. This applies not only to languages which survive in a very restricted corpus (the so-called Restprachen) but also, in specific cases, to Latin and Ancient Greek. Indeed, particularly in geographically ‘peripheral’ areas, epigraphic documents written in these languages may be part of a fragmentary collection or may even constitute an isolated case, or unicum. In these circumstances, apparently ‘bad’ (Labov, 1994: 11) or ‘imperfect data’ (Janda and Joseph, 2003: 14) might seem to be even less suited to useful (socio)-linguistic analysis. This difficulty can be at least partly overcome by reconstructing as accurately as possible both linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts (historical, social and cultural, including scribal practices; cf., among others, Mancini’s papers). To this end, the adoption of a multi-modal approach (Mullen, 2012) is essential in order to integrate strictly linguistic data with information obtainable from extra-linguistic elements. Given the richness and variety of the components involved in this kind of historical socio-linguistic analysis, the present paper aims to define more sharply – and perhaps redefine – the notion of ‘context’ in research which examines scarce documentary evidence. In this, particular attention is paid to the advantages that can be obtained by comparing a very limited corpus, or even a ‘single’ text, with documents of the same typology (literary texts, dedications, administrative documents, defixiones and so on), even when these are written in a different language to the text under investigation (see, for example, Mancini, 2012, 2014). The applicability and the appropriateness of this methodological approach and, in particular, the importance of considering various contexts, are demonstrated through the presentation of some case studies involving both Indo-European (for example, Old Persian and Ancient Greek in inscriptions found in Iran) and non-Indo-European languages (for example, Elamite).