School of Love: The Speech of Plautine Prostitutes in Different Stages of Their Working Lifecycle

This thesis focuses on the differentiation of Plautine sex workers and proposes that their speech varies across early, middle, and late career stages, using as a touchstone Adams’ observations that “whores are not a homogenous class” and that gender should be observed at different points within individual lives. By exploring their habits of speech, I address a gap in existing scholarship, which has primarily categorized these figures based on their actions as mala or bona. I rely on sociolinguistic approaches, including critical discourse analysis and gendered speech markers as identified by Adams, Dutsch, and Barrios-Lech to propose a more nuanced characterization of prostitutes.