Tempi comici e punteggiatura dell’interazione nel 'Mercator' di Plauto

The purpose of the present article is to analyse how Plautus manipulates the rhythm of interaction in his dialogues in order to create comic effects. For this reason, the comedy Mercator, in which a complex system of deliberate plays on the alteration of conversational rhythm evidently emerges, was chosen as a case study. Traditional methodologies of the study of comic clichés are supported by the pragmatics of communication, with particular reference to the punctuation of the interactive sequence, that is useful for classifying some of the specific phenomena of rhythmic inversion that recur in Mercator. The recording of such interactive anomalies enables the recognition of the presence of a system of rhythmic modules - which are relaborated within a wide range of creative variations – that innervates the entire comedy in a complex orchestration that leads to a final crescendo.