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Iterated modal marking and polarity focus in ancient Greek

The Ancient Greek particle an, which encodes modal and irrealis semantics, canonically occurs once per clause. In the fifth century BCE, however, we find cases where two tokens (or, more rarely, three) co‐occur with the same verb. While this …

Wackernagel’s law and the fall of the Lydian empire

This paper offers a novel reading of the Delphic oracle’s response to Croesus’s question of whether he should attack Persia (Herodotus 1), by focusing on a previously unacknowledged feature of the oracular answer: the preposing of the …

The synchrony and diachrony of a scalar coordinator: Latin nedum ‘let alone’

This paper investigates the amphichronic semantics and pragmatics of the scalar coordinator nēdum, ‘let alone’. Synchronically, nēdum must be preceded by an assertion that is stronger than all other alternative propositions in the focus …