The Prosody Of Greek Speech

The reconstruction of the prosody of a dead language is, on the face of it, an almost impossible undertaking. However, once a general theory of prosody has been developed from eliable data in living languages, it is possible to exploit texts as sources of answers to questions that would normally be answered in the laboratory. In this work, the authors interpret the evidence of Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on crosslinguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data, and reconstruct the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing, and intonation of classical Greek speech. Sophisticated statistical analyses are employed to support an impressive range of new findings which relate not only to phonetics and phonology, but also to pragmatics and the syntax-phonology interface.

The reconstruction of the prosody of a dead language is, on the face of it, an almost impossible undertaking. However, once a general theory of prosody has been developed from reliable data in living languages, it is possible to exploit texts as sources of answers to questions that would normally be answered in the laboratory. In this work, the authors interpret the evidence of Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on crosslinguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data, and reconstruct the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing, and intonation of classical Greek speech. Sophisticated statistical analyses are employed to support an impressive range of new findings which relate not only to phonetics and phonology, but also to pragmatics and the syntax-phonology interface.

This study interprets ancient Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on cross-linguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data. It reconstructs the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing and intonation of Greek speech.

"The source and nature of earliest speech and civilization are puzzles that have intrigued people for many centuries. This book explores Greek ideas on the beginnings of language, and the links between speech and civilization. It is a study of ancient Greek views on the nature of the world's first society and first language, the source of language, the development of civilization and speech, and the relation between people's level of civilization and the kind of language they use." "Discussions of later Western reflections on the origin and development of language and society, particularly during the Enlightenment, feature in the book, along with brief surveys of recent research on glottogenesis, the acquisition of language, and the beginnings of civilization."--BOOK JACKET.

Applying linguistic theory to the study of Homeric style, Egbert J. Bakker offers a highly innovative approach to oral poetry, particularly the poetry of Homer. By situating formulas and other features of oral style within the wider contexts of spoken language and communication, he moves the study of oral poetry beyond the landmark work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. One of the book's central features, related to the research of the linguist Wallace Chafe, is Bakker's conception of spoken discourse as a sequence of short speech units reflecting the flow of speech through the consciousness of the speaker. Bakker shows that such short speech units are present in Homeric poetry, with significant consequences for Homeric metrics and poetics. Considering Homeric discourse as a speech process rather than as the finished product associated with written discourse, Bakker's book offers a new perspective on Homer as well as on other archaic Greek texts. Here Homeric discourse appears as speech in its own right, and is freed, Bakker suggests, from the bias of modern writing style which too easily views Homeric discourse as archaic, implicitly taking the style of classical period texts as the norm. Bakker's perspective reaches beyond syntax and stylistics into the very heart of Homeric--and, ultimately, oral--poetics, altering the status of key features such as meter and formula, rethinking their relevance to the performance of Homeric poetry, and leading to surprising insights into the relation between "speech" and "text" in the encounter of the Homeric tradition with writing.

Speech in Speech explores the techniques by which Classical Greek texts written primarily for public performance weave in direct quotations (oratio recta) of "other voices"-imagined or real. This "speech in speech" is usually perceived as endowed with a greater vividness and authenticity than indirect quotation, even when the words report what someone might say, or enliven the verbal texture of plays and speeches, and examines the intricate relation of direct quotations to their "originals". As the first synoptic and detailed study of oratio recta in Classical Greek literature, Speech in Speech will be useful to anyone interested in ancient literary technique.