| Summary: | The high incidence of apostrophes, in Martial’s epigrams, is closely related to enunciative features in this literary genre. The addressing becomes a means for the speaker of preserving the speech situation, by selecting an addressee defined by his nominative identification. But if the discriminating role of the apostrophe of proper noun could be quite easily determinated, that goes differently for utterances such as Faustine, Bassus ibat in plena reda, where proper noun in the vocative case is distinct from a third party’s proper noun, subject of the utterance. It is, indeed, not located on the same plan that the rest of the utterance, owing to organization into a specific hierarchy: on the one hand, the speaker explicitly talks to an addressee; and on the other hand he delivers a statement that takes on meaning only in relation to the precedent address, and is therefore entirely submitted to the apostrophe. After studying several kinds of epigrams containing this structure – votive epigrams, epigrams-epitaphs, epigrams introduced by a question asked by the addressee –, it appears that apostrophe becomes the mark of the primacy of the addressee over the speaker, who is no more « the one who says I », but « the one who says you ». Rather than the marks of subjectivity, those of otherness should be looked for in the utterance. The apostrophe, though involving a tensive relationship between speaker and addressee, changes its logic, since the speaker chooses to stay in the background for his partner.
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