Communicative anchoring in Cicero's letters

The goal of this paper is to explore in a small epistolary corpus how a speaker/writer communicatively anchors his message in the presupposed common ground with the addressee. The corpus exists of three Ciceronian letters (Att. 6.6, Fam. 2.15 and Fam. 3.12) written on the same day about
the same topic to three different addressees. The underlying idea is that common ground management plays a crucial role in communication and that each speaker – addressee situation influences the communicative choices in a distinct way. A sociological distinction between primary groups, secondary groups, subgroups and non-groups helps to define in very general terms the different possible levels of common ground between speaker and addressee and the letters selected for comparative analysis each belong to a different sociological group. The comparison in communicative anchoring shows explainable differences in the use of narrative and fictive dialogue, abstract nouns referring to properties of the speaker and addressee, negation and subordination. This paper ends with a discussion of the qualitative methodology of this small exploration and of possibly relevant parameters in a follow-up quantitative research.