Attenuated, modified, assent–seeking declaratives, interrogation and urbanitas in the Greek of Platonic dialogue

Declaratively formed sentences span a scale of meaning ranging from categorical and assertive statements, utterances with varying degrees of conduciveness to assent of addressee or interlocutor (as elaborated for Contemporary English e.g. by Quirk et al.), to questions. In this paper I examine language and other formal patterns in declaratively contoured sentences in Plato's Gorgias and Republic in an attempt to single out features which may contribute to conduciveness to assent of such utterances in the prose Classical Greek dialogue style of Plato. A comment by the 6th c. exegete Olympiodorus on a passage (446a9) from the Gorgias where Socrates critiques the question status Polus attaches to an interrogative he performs, serves as a point of departure later taken up by Sicking (1997) for what he calls αρα utterances on a gliding scale. After some preliminary observations on elements which reflect the fluid scales of utterance meaning (discrepancies in punctuation in manuscripts and editions; in translations), the following will be discussed in some more detail: particles, adverbs and other expressions of attenuation (§4); response formulae (§5); tag questions (§6); and illocutionary parentheticals (§7). Combinations, distributions, and factors such as attenuators for urbanitas, modalizing force of που, and discrete viz. combined role of tag questions and IFIDS, are taken into account in an integration of these elements and their contribution towards expressing or assessing utterance meaning on a scale between questions and statements in Classical Greek philosophical dialogue.