Among cuneiform texts, only letters address directly a concrete
historical person. Letters being texts composed and used in
everyday verbal interaction, they replace direct communication.
This specific situational context provokes basic questions such
as: from the point of view of the ancient letter writer, what
are the conventionally possible ways of expressing the
intentions of the sender? And from the modern researcher's
standpoint, how can we detect the 'tone' of a given letter? This
study focuses neither on the facts represented and the persons
communicating nor on the system of the language, but is rather
concerned with the specific, rule-governed use of language in
interaction. The method employed is a combination of the
philological treatment of the texts with questions and insights
from linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis, and text
linguistics. The book concentrates on the corpus of Old
Babylonian letters from Mesopotamia. The topics treated include:
address behaviour, i.e. use and interdepende