Pragmatic effects of intersubjective evidentiality. On Classical Greek oukh horâis? ‘don’t you see?’ in dialogic interaction

The aim of this article is to analyse the use of the negative question oukh horâis? ‘do you not see?’ in Classical Greek, investigating its occurrences in all the plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. To my knowledge, this strategy has not been systematically investigated in Greek through a corpus-based approach, which means that the functions assumed by oukh horâis? still need to be explained. This paper fills the gap by exploring the functional values and the pragmatic effects emerging from the use of the oukh horâis? strategy in the context of dialogic interactions. In light of recent studies on the intersubjective impact of evidential strategies, especially, though not exclusively, on their use in interrogative contexts, I propose to interpret oukh horâis? as a non-canonical, assertive question with an evidential intersubjective value, primarily encompassing the domain of visual evidentiality but also allowing the expression of inferential evidentiality. It is shown that the oukh horâis? strategy enables the speaker to (i) engage the hearer by guiding their focus to a visual source of information which is relevant to the construction of their interaction, (ii) make the hearer responsible, and (iii) share responsibility, ultimately with an agreement-seeking function. The contribution also examines the occurrences of the non-negative question horâis? ‘do you see?’ for comparative purposes. The results achieved in this work thus represent a contribution to Greek linguistics, but they also have a relevant impact for studies on intersubjectivity and on the pragmatic value of evidentiality.