Pragmatics

The Old Irish article

Although the Old Irish article in is standardly described as a marker of definiteness, it also co-occurs with indefinite nouns. This phenomenon has long been known in the literature, but thus far even an adequate descriptive account of it has proven …

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 …

Review of H. Halla-aho, The non-literary Latin letters: A study of their syntax and pragmatics (Helsinki 2009)

Review of J. Willmott, The moods of Homeric Greek (Cambridge 2007)

Review of H. Dik, Word order in Greek tragic dialogue (Oxford 2007)