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.

本论文聚焦普劳图斯喜剧笔下性工作者的群体分化问题，提出其言语表达会随职业早期、中期与晚期阶段呈现差异，并以亚当斯的两项观察作为研究试金石：其一为“妓女并非同质化群体”，其二为性别研究应结合个体生命的不同节点展开。现有学术研究主要依据行为将这类人物划分为mala与bona两类，本文通过探究其言语习惯，弥补了既有研究的这一空白。本文采用社会语言学研究方法，包括批判话语分析以及亚当斯、杜奇与巴里奥莱斯提出的性别言语标记，以期对妓女群体提出更为精细化的角色刻画。