From 2010 to 2014, the Classics Department at the University of Heidelberg set out to trace over two millennia of research on Greek particles within and beyond ancient Greek. Particles in Ancient Greek Discourse builds on this scholarship and analyzes particle use across five genres: epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, and historiography.
Central in this volume of the 6th International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics is the question how cohesion is created in Ancient Greek texts. The contributions to the volume either discuss the various cohesive devices that occur in a specific text or focus on the use and function of a particular cohesion device in a larger corpus. Apart from the use of pronomina and particles, less standard cohesive devices, like the use of tense and the grammatical form of complements, are taken into consideration. The result is a volume that gives a good impression of recent research in the field of Greek linguistics, not only of interest for classical scholars, but also for general linguists interested in discourse coherence cnd cohesion. Contributors include: Rutger J. Allan, St phanie J. Bakker, Louis Basset, Anna Bonifazi, Annemieke Drummen, Marietje (A.M.) van Erp Taalman Kip, Coulter H. George, Luuk Huitink, Sander Orriens, Annemieke van der Plaat, Antonio Revuelta, Albert Rijksbaron and Gerry C. Wakker.
Anna Bonifazi examines the evocative power of linguistic elements in the Homeric text--in particular, the use of αύ- adverbs and particles to signal upcoming content and the ambiguous use of pronouns to evoke the complexity of Odysseus' identity. She shows that, by deliberately merging distinct meanings, the text incorporates different viewpoints.
The volume assembles about 50 contributions presented at the Intenational Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics, held in Rome, March 2015. This Colloquium opened a new series of international conferences that has replaced previous national meetings on this subject. They embrace essential topics of Ancient Greek Linguistics with different theoretical and methodological approaches: particles and their functional uses; phonology; tense, aspect, modality; syntax and thematic roles; lexicon and onomastics; Greek and other languages; speech acts and pragmatics.
Using a cognitive-functional linguistic framework and cross-linguistic research on discourse markers, Christopher J. Fresch investigates the use of five discourse markers in the documentary papyri of the third to first centuries BCE and the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. Through this analysis, Fresch proposes linguistically grounded descriptions for how each discourse marker uniquely functions to guide readers in how they process and comprehend the text. Based on these descriptions, he examines the instances of these discourse markers in the Greek translation of the Minor Prophets and how the translator used them to render the Hebrew text. Fresch presents a picture of a translator who selected discourse markers based on their own understanding of the structure, flow, and meaning of the underlying Hebrew text. Their use attests to a translator who was contextually aware and who desired to produce a translation in idiomatic Koine.
Pragmatics forms nowadays an integral part of the description not only of modern languages but also of ancient languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek. This book explores various pragmatic phenomena in these two languages, which are accessible through corpora consisting of a broad range of text types. It comprises empirical synchronic studies that deal with three main topics: (i) speech acts and pragmatic markers, (ii) word order, and (iii) discourse markers and particles. The specificity of this book consists in the discussion and application of various methodological approaches. It provides new insights into the pragmatic phenomena encountered, compares, where possible, the results of the investigation of the two languages, and draws conclusions of a more general nature. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on pragmatics in general and to scholars of Latin and Ancient Greek in particular.
A comprehensive account of the language of Ancient Greek civilization in a single volume, with contributions from leading international scholars covering the historical, geographical, sociolinguistic, and literary perspectives of the language. A collection of 36 original essays by a team of international scholars Treats the survival and transmission of Ancient Greek Includes discussions on phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
This collection presents current work on discourse structuring from a theoretical as well as a processing perspective. The main objectives are the investigation of appropriate levels of analysis for discourse segmentation and criteria for the identification of basic discourse units.
