Journal of Greek Linguistics最新文献

In this paper I analyse the shifting usage of the Discourse Marker ἰδού in the Greek papyri corpora of epistolary nature dating from the 3rd c. BC to the 5th c. AD. My methodology is largely based on the account of grammaticalization as presented in Traugott and Dasher (2001), and pays particular attention to the questions of pragmatic inference, syntactic scope, modality and politeness. I claim that the distribution of usages we find in the papyri corpora can be understood as an outcome of development of ἰδού alongside several different paths: first from an exophoric deictic marker to an endophoric deictic marker, and then from a deictic marker to a marker of epistemic force and adversativity, an emphatic marker and a marker of reproach, and a politeness marker.

Word formation is often considered in many phonological studies to involve concatenation of morphemes. However, a morpheme-based morphological analysis runs into difficulties when dealing with accentuation patterns in Ancient Greek. On the one hand, Ancient Greek adjectives suffixed with -es and -to show different accentuation patterns that cannot be easily accounted for by assigning accentual properties to the morphemes they contain. On the other hand, forms with contracted vowels show that the assignment of lexical accent and default accent occurs at different cycles in phonology. This paper proposes a word-based model that is developed within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2005; 2007; 2010) for phonological analysis: word formation is based on analogical parallelism among morphologically related word forms, which is modeled as the instantiation of schemata. Accentual properties are considered idiosyncrasies of schemata, and the observed accentuation patterns can be accounted for via two cycles within the Optimality Theory (OT) framework.

This study addresses the phonological representation and phonetic realization of pitch patterns found on or near prosodically prominent syllables in Ancient Greek, namely, the distinction between the so-called “acute” and “circumflex” accents. Empirically, we investigate in detail the correlation between tones and tunes in the Delphic hymns (DAGM 20 and 21) on syllables capable of bearing a circumflex accent (i.e., syllables containing a long vowel or diphthong = VV-syllables). This data supports two major findings. First, VV-syllables with circumflex accent are significantly more likely to be set to a melism than VV-syllables that are acute, grave, or unaccented, and, moreover, the proportion of melismatic settings among acute, unaccented, and grave VV-syllables does not significantly differ. Second, circumflex melisms consistently (always or nearly so) fall in pitch (on average, by three semitones), whereas acute and unaccented melisms may either rise or fall (on average, by 1.5–2.25 semitones in either direction). Taken together, this data conforms to the usual description of the circumflex as a falling pitch, [H L], but speaks against claims that the acute constitutes a rising pitch ([L H], or High alone aligned with the latter portion of a VV-syllable, [∅ H]). We instead conclude that the acute represents a single High pitch target phonologically mapped to the entirety of a VV-syllable, and discuss the implications for the phonological analysis of the prosody of Ancient Greek in light of the typology of contour tones.

The present work looks at the term ksénos as an access point to the enacted model of hospitality—ksenía—in ancient Greece. It deduces the onomasiological and semasiological spread of the term across the model’s participants, namely GUEST, STRANGER but also HOST, into a schematic prototypical core within a complex and dynamic conceptual integration model. Along the spatial continuum of DISTANCE-APPROACHING-PROXIMITY, the analysis looks into APPROACHING as an emergent space, where GIFT-EXCHANGE is interpreted as a process of mental-space shift on the part of a stable SELF confronting the incoming OTHER. POSSESSIONS EXCHANGE conceptualised as non-commodifiable and non-alienable to the giver activates the metaphorical relation HAVE as BE. Thus, the abrupt confrontation is accommodated as an ad hoc partial substitutability of each participant’s identity by the identity of the other. Some Proto-Indo-European etymologies proposed in literature for the term are reviewed, and their compatibility with the present analysis is evaluated.

Derivational morphology is an umbrella term used for concatenative and non-concatenative processes for the formation of new lexemes. In Modern Greek, derivational morphology is one of the major morphological processes along with compounding and inflection. In recent years, research on derivational morphology has evolved rapidly. We present here the state-of-the-art on the recent advances in the derivational morphology of Modern Greek. First, we present affixational derivation by focusing on the main features of the derivational affixes used in Modern Greek and then we present the non-concatenative derivational processes. We also discuss the main theoretical issues related to derivational morphology, that is, constraints, competition and productivity of derivational patterns, and the main theoretical approaches to Modern Greek derivational structures. Finally, we present some general themes of derivational morphology, including the relationship between derivation and other morphological processes and the role of derivational morphology in scientific terminology, language teaching/lexicography and psycholinguistics. We aim to contribute to better understanding of how morphology works by highlighting the potential of research on derivational morphology in Modern Greek.

Many adjectives in Modern Greek form both synthetic and analytic comparatives and relative superlatives. To our knowledge, this is the first work to examine the triggers of the Synthetic-Analytic (S-A) variation in this language by means of a corpus study. To date, numerous studies have shown that a series of predictors (phonological, lexical, syntactic) appear to influence the S-A variation in English. The present paper focuses on some factors mentioned in the existing literature (e.g., frequency, number of syllables, syntactic position etc.) alongside Text Type, which is explicitly used as a predictor for the first time. Overall, our results suggest that 1) the S-A variation seems to be influenced by similar predictors cross-linguistically and 2) comparatives and relative superlatives show a partially different picture in Modern Greek, as is also the case in English (Cheung & Zhang 2016).