The diffraction of iam: contextual effects in interpretation

This chapter draws attention to a fairly frequent set of occurrences of iam which are usually interpreted as having a deictic value and thus translated as ‘right now’, ‘soon’, or not translated at all. After first discussing the most straightforward temporal uses (corresponding to interpretations such as ‘already’ and ‘almost’), this paper proposes a unified account of iam as a Tense-Aspect-Mood operator, which always maintains a stable ‘anaphoric’ character but allows a diffraction of different though related interpretations depending on context. The data we will discuss are mostly but not exclusively taken from Plautus’s plays.