The diversification of the ancient Greek dialects remains one of the most recalcitrant problems in Greek linguistics. Debates persist over a number of fundamental issues, including the methodology of historical inference, the divergence times of the …
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 …
Passive agents in ancient Greek exhibit a well-known alternation between dative case and prepositional phrase. It has long been recognized that grammatical aspect plays a crucial role in this alternation: dative agents preponderate among aspectually …
The synchronic distribution and diachronic trajectory of Homeric -phi(n) have been the source of long-standing debate, with the result that scholarly opinion has yet to settle on a consensus regarding the morphosyntax of forms realized by this …
Although the morphology of Homeric Greek has been richly described and rigorously analyzed, from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, most of this work is tacitabout the relationship between morphosyntactic properties and their formal …
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 …
In this paper we discuss second position clitics in ancient Greek, which show a remarkable ability to break up syntactic constituents. We argue against attempts to capture such data in terms of a mismatch between c-structure yield and surface string …
Enclitic distribution in Greek (and archaic Indo-European generally) is governed by a set of generalizations known as Wackernagel’s Law, according to which enclitics occur in “second position.” As has long been known, surface …
I offer the first theoretically informed study of second-position clitics in Ancient Greek and challenges the long-standing belief that Greek word order is ‟free” or beyond the reach of systematic analysis. On the basis of Herodotus’ Histories, he …