It has long been debated whether morphosyntactic change is teleological. Jespersen (1917:4), for instance, maintained that emphatic negative constructions are created in response to the weakening of older negative adverbs. Others have argued that …
The comparative method depends crucially on the phylogenetic tree of the languages under comparison, but in many linguistic families, including Indo-European, the true tree is unknown. To circumvent this issue, frequency heuristics have been devised …
This chapter contrasts the Liddell and Scott (LSJ) account of the particle γε with an approach that takes advantage of some of the conceptual tools of twenty-first century semantics and pragmatics. It begins by discussing the question of why …
Ennius 550 Sk (atque atque accedit muros Romana iuventus, ‘The Roman youth atque atque advanced against the walls’) has long puzzled scholars on account of what appear to be side-by-side tokens of the conjunction atque ‘and’. …