Use Smaller Words, Socrates: Using Words and Particles to Predict Conversation Types in the Socratic Dialogues

Abstract

How might Socrates’ dialogues be characterized by more back and forth and less lecturing? Plato’s Dialogues of Socrates is a collection of conversations between Socrates and at least one counterpart. This paper attempts to determine what characteristics of a Socratic speech might elicit a response of similar length from his counterpart. This paper examines the entire Socratic Dialogue corpus in ancient Greek to examine several possible variables that might change the type of conversation: number of words used, number of questions asked, and the presence of certain particles (such as γε and δή). This paper finds that several features are correlated with different types of conversation.

Thompson, Benjamin. 2023. Use Smaller Words, Socrates: Using Words and Particles to Predict Conversation Types in the Socratic Dialogues. UGA Working Papers in Linguistics 6, 252-263. The Linguistics Society at UGA: Athens, GA.