A Morphosyntactic analysis of speech introductions and conclusions in Homer (original) (raw)

The Augment in Homer, with special attention to speech introductions and conclusions

2015

In this article, we will show that the use of the augment in Homeric speech introductions and conclusions was not random, but could be explained by morphometric, syntactic and semantic constraints. Later, these rules were no longer understood: the augment became a mandatory marker of past tense in Greek prose, while its absence in Homer (which was also motivated by rules and constraints) was reinterpreted as an archaism and an element of the poetic language. The article only focuses on Homeric speech introductions and conclusions, and leaves out a discussion of Homer and epic poetry in general, of Mycenaean and the other Indo-European languages that have the augment.

The pragmatic meanings of some discourse markers in Homer

Pragmatische Kategorien: Form, Funktion und Diachronie. Akten der Arbeitstagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft von 24. Bis 26. September 2007 in Marburg (edd. E. Rieken, P. Widmer), 2009

The overarching topic of this paper is the grammaticalization of some Homeric discourse features; in other words, special attention is devoted to grammatical phenomena that signal how to process one or more discourse units. Discourse-either in written or in spoken form-refers to the manner of verbal communication; as such, it shows connections to the communicative context and it signals the speaker's/writer's communicative intentions. 1 As Bakker 1997 has convincingly shown, Homeric epic can be analyzed in terms of discourse; information units are conveyed by discourse units that articulate the flow of narration-hence we have breaks, developments of ideas, additions and so on. The manner of communication in the Homeric poems is detectable whenever the text includes metacommunicative features informing the recipients about what is going on at the level of performance. Especially in the last twenty years, secondary literature has more or less directly underscored several meta-communicative aspects of the Homeric language that tell us something about the relationship between the primary narrator and the audience. These aspects relate to non-impersonality through focalization (De Jong 1987), to narrative continuity , to the characters' speeches mirroring the poet's speech , to the use of irony (Dekker 1965), to misdirections (Morrison 1992), and to the choice of elliptical messages to be presumably balanced by gestures . To this I add the different modes of communication that characterize single sections of the epic narrative, such as performing similes, performing catalogues, performing lamentswhich involve both the primary narrator and the characters.

Discontinuous and expletive topic expressions in Homeric Greek

Proceedings of the Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (Rome, 2015), 2017

Some Homeric utterances contain both a demonstrative pronoun at the beginning and a coreferent NP at the end. In most cases, the pronoun is analyzed as a non-ratified topic expression and the NP as a ratified topic expression: the former is used to reestablish the referent as a topic of the new utterance, whereas the latter clarifies the identity of the referent, which is already ratified as a topic at this point of the utterance. Each phrase is located in its dedicated slot in the Ancient Greek word order template: the non-ratified topic expression at the beginning of the clause and ratified topic expression immediately after the verb, hence the discontinuity. This discontinuous topic construction is not to be confused with another similar one, in which the NP is a presentative focus expression; in the latter construction, the initial anaphoric pronoun may be an expletive topic expression.

Berthold Delbrück and the syntax of cases: an analysis of the case ending -φι in Homer

This is the summary and the abstract of our contribution in the proceedings of the Delbrück-conference, but we cannot post the article as formatted and published in the Proceedings here. This is therefore not the published version of the article nor the version formatted by the editing company. It is the submitted version of the article. For the page numbers and the exact subdivisions, please refer to published version and the conference proceedings In this article, we investigate Delbrück’s analysis of the cases by discussing the case ending -φι in Homer. He himself treated the issue on three occasions and stated that this case form remained insufficiently and unsatisfactorily explained. Initially, he argued that the original meaning was the instrumental-comitative, expanded with locative and ablative functions and the original number was the plural. Later, however, he assumed that the ending could also be used for the genitive and the dative. As Mycenaean had not been discovered at his time and he could therefore not have included it, we focus in our analysis solely on -φι in Homer and only refer to Mycenaean sparingly. First, we provide an overview of the scholarship on Homer, distinguishing between the scholars writing before the decipherment (including Delbrück) and the ones after it. In a second step, we determine our corpus by discussing some passages with uncertain transmission (αὐτόφι versus αὐτόθι and Ἰλιόφι κλυτὰ τείχεα). We then provide the figures and proceed to the actual analysis. We start with number, animacy and concreteness, then discuss the case usages - locative, instrumental, object marking - and the use of the forms with prepositions. After that, we take a closer look at the distribution of the forms and their co-occurrence with genitive and dative forms in the same sentence and the same syntagma. At the end of the article, we analyse the instances for which more than one interpretation is possible. Our analysis shows that the suffix is numerus-indifferent and that instances with an unambiguous plural are relatively uncommon, that the suffix appears almost exclusively with inanimate entities, is used predominantly with concrete elements, has often instrumental and locative meaning, but can also be used as an ablative and is very common with prepositions (more than half of the instances). Our findings differ from what Delbrück himself noted in two respects, namely the lack of animacy and the lack of plural meaning, and from the data in Mycenaean in three respects, namely the mostly singular meaning of the suffix (in Mycenaean, the suffix is almost exclusively used in the plural), its common use with prepositions and with the ablative and locative-directive functions (these two uses are very rare in Mycenaean). They also make the interpretation of the ending as a simple oblique case marker or a simple poetic tool less likely and shed new light on the original function and the origin of the ending and its use in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages, but that discussion cannot be performed in the current article.

The Interaction between Presupposition and Focus:Classical Greek Wh-Exclamatives

In this paper, we argue against the claim that exclamatives could be reducible to interrogatives in Classical Greek as sometimes argued for English. Exclamatives are original in that they denote presupposed propositions, are headed by specific (wh-morpheme h-) and focused wh-items. They necessarily involve degrees. We try to make sense of all these features by showing that the exclamative speech act resides in the meeting of knowledge (presupposition, specificity) and unexpectedness (focus, extended scales) at the semantic/pragmatic/syntax interface.