Negatives And Noun Phrases In Classical Greek

The use in Classical Greek of the two negatives, ov and un, in noun phrases is a much-debated matter in the literature on Greek grammar. Several, sometimes interrelated, factors have been adduced as decisive for the choice of negative in such cases - the predominant one being that of reference. Already a brief survey of almost any Greek text, however shows that there is a considerable overlap between the employment of ov and un in the uses which the grammarians distinguish. The present study investigates in a consequent fashion the use of the two negatives in noun phrases in the works of Plato. A new picture of negation in Greek noun phrases is thus gradually built up, where the interplay between ov and un in such cases is described in a more consistent way than by the earlier accounts.

On the basis of a functional analysis of the order and articulation of noun phrase constituents in Herodotus, this book tries to answer the question as to which factors determine word order variation in the Greek NP.

This collective volume contains thirty six original studies on various aspects of Ancient Greek language, linguistics and philology written by an international group of leading authorities in the field. The essays are organized in five thematic groups covering a wide variety of issues of ancient Greek linguistics, ranging from epigraphy and the study of individual dialects to various other aspects of the structure of the language, such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, lexicon and word formation, etymology, metrics as well as many syntactic matters and problems of pragmatics and stylistics of the language; a number of essays move in the middle ground where language, linguistics and philology crosscut and cross-fertilize each other with the application of linguistic theory to the study of classical texts. The work is of special relevance to scholars interested in Greek linguistics in general and in particular aspects of the Greek language.

This book provides a thorough investigation of the expression of sentential negation in the history of Greek. It draws on both quantitative data from texts dating from three major stages of vernacular Greek (Attic Greek, Koine, and Late Medieval Greek), and qualitative data from all stages of the language, from Homeric Greek to Standard Modern Greek. Katerina Chatzopoulou accounts for the contrast between the two complementary negators found in Greek, referred to as a NEG1 and NEG2, in terms of the latter's sensitivity to nonveridicality, and explains the asymmetry observed in the diachronic development of the Greek negator system. The volume also sets out a new interpretation of Jespersen's cycle, which abstracts away from the morphosyntactic and phonological properties of the phenomenon and proposes instead that it is best understood in semantic terms. This approach not only explains the patterns observed in Greek, but also those found in other languages that deviate from the traditional description of Jespersen's cycle.

Despite the intensive research carried out in recent years, modality remains an intriguing and challenging issue in linguistics. This book investigates modality from a syntactic viewpoint and with a bottom-up approach. A strong focus of the book is the interaction between the different linguistic tools that build modality (moods, modal verbs, modal adverbs, etc.), taking both the role of syntactic structure and the compositionality of modal meanings into account. The volume comprises corpus-based studies devoted to several syntactic aspects of modality in Ancient Greek, within different theoretical frameworks. The chapters shed new light on different modal categories (e.g. epistemicity, possibility, counterfactuality, evidentiality, subjectivity) and show how these modal meanings arise from the combination of different linguistic devices in specific syntactic contexts (e.g. combinations of modal elements, types of main and dependent clauses, types of illocutionary acts, etc.). By approaching modality from a different perspective and providing an up-to-date discussion of several aspects of modality, the book makes a significant contribution to current debates.

This volume brings together twenty papers by Albert Rijksbaron, a leading scholar of Ancient Greek, dealing with central topics in Greek linguistics such as tense-aspect, mood, voice, particles, negation, the article, questions, discourse analysis and the views of ancient grammarians.

Following an interdisciplinary and text-oriented approach, the contributions to this volume discuss various linguistic and literary apects of Greek and Latin prose and poetry and therewith aim at bridging the gap between linguistic and literary study of classical texts.