In youth Carton is a savage wine, insolent, loud-voiced and blustering. But after seven years or so he has learnt manners, and can come into a room like an educated gentleman. J. B. MORTON ['Beachcomber'], A Bonfire of Weeds (London 1939) A N AMUSING but enigmatic fragment from a fourth-century Athenian comedy appears to give the lie to the idea that the precious, humanising metaphors of wine c...

The best improvisational theatre actors can make any scene partner, of any skill level or ability, appear talented and proficient in the art form, and thus "make them shine". To challenge this improvisational paradigm, we built an artificial intelligence (AI) trained to perform live shows alongside human actors for human audiences. Over the course of 30 performances to a combined audience of al...

The only fully intact textual evidence from fifth-century and (very) early fourth-century comedy are the eleven completely preserved comedies by Aristophanes, who was born, in all likelihood, shortly after 450 bce and died after 388 bce.1 This is, in fact, not as thin a basis as one might initially think. For not only is the number of completely preserved Aristophanic comedies actually quite hi...

Pragmatics moves away from the word level and sentence level study of language towards the study of language in real-world context and at discourse level whereby two or more participants take part in conversation. There are moments when the speaker explicitly says something but the listener may have other interpretations and inferences from their statements. The aim of this study was to demonst...