Jorie Soltic

The distribution of object clitic pronouns in the Grottaferrata manuscript of Digenis Akritis

The Grottaferrata manuscript of Digenis Akritis may be of more interest to Medieval Greek linguists than previously assumed. This rather ‘archaizing’ version obeys the same medieval distribution rules for object clitic pronouns postulated by Mackridge for the more ‘vernacular’ Escorial version. Moreover, it is shown that the medieval rules – divided into a syntactic and a pragmatic principle – clearly constitute a gradual continuation of older, post-Classical, tendencies. Much attention is paid to the pragmatic principle in relation to verbs, which is invoked as an explanatory principle for apparent exceptions.

The late medieval Greek Vernacular πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry: a modern linguistic analysis into intonation units

The Late Medieval Greek “vernacular” (12th–15th c.) is one of the least studied stages of the history of the Greek language. The lack of interest by linguists can presumably be ascribed to its major source, i.e. metrical πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry. The language of this type of poetry has been labelled a “Kunstsprache”, because of its oral-formulaic character and because of its mixed idiom incorporating vernacular yet also archaizing elements. In this article, however, I demonstrate that the Late Medieval Greek πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry should not automatically be excluded from linguistic research, given that it clearly possesses a strongly vernacular, i.e. spoken, syntactic base: its underlying syntax runs in a very natural way. This is proven by the fact that we can apply the modern linguistic concept of the Intonation Unit, the basic unit of analysis in contemporary spoken(!) languages, to the texts composed in the πολιτικὸς στίχος: far from having an artificial syntax, the πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry is conceptually made up of short, simple “chunks” of information. More precisely, each verse consists of two (stylized) Intonation Units, demarcated by the fixed caesura, which can thus be equated with an Intonation Unit boundary. This thesis is supported by various arguments, both of a metrical and of a syntactico-semantic nature. Arguments belonging to the former category are the length of each half-line, the possibility of stress on the first syllable of each half-line, the origin of the metre, and especially the avoidance of elision at the caesura. In the second category of (syntactico-semantic) evidence, we can consider the tendency of each half-line for constituting a grammatical sense-unit. I also bring forward some little-studied syntactic features of Late Medieval Greek: first, I pay attention to the distribution of the archaizing “Wackernagel particles”, which do not only appear in second position in the verse, but also occur after the first word/constituent following the caesura and thus further confirm my thesis. The same holds for the position of “corrective afterthoughts”, for the verbs and pronominal objects taking the singular are consistently separated from their plural referents by the caesura. Once the Intonation Unit is thus established as a meaningful methodological tool for the analysis of the πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry, the way is cleared for more linguistic research on the Late Medieval Greek vernacular.

The gnomic aorist in Hesiod

This article studies the use of the gnomic aorist, i.e., the aorist indicative, in omnitemporal statements, covering its origin, its synchronic semantic value in Ancient and Classical Greek, and the difference between this aorist and the present indicative in omnitemporal statements. Due to the lack of a proper form to express both omnitemporality and perfectivity, the (secondary) aorist indicative was used in Greek in cases where the speaker wanted to emphasize the (perfective) aspect of the relevant state of affairs. The existence of borderline cases is understandable if we take the so-called Prototype theory into account. The research is based on Hesiod, but most conclusions seem valid for other cases of the gnomic aorist also.

Variation and change in Ancient Greek tense, aspect and modality

In this collective volume, some of the leading experts in the field explore aspects of linguistic variation and change in one of the core areas of Ancient Greek grammar: tense, aspect, and modality.

The Late Medieval Greek πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry: language, metre and discourse

In this contribution, I offer a summary of my 2015 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Ghent on the language and metre of Late Medieval Greek πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry as they pertain to information structure.

The Late Medieval Greek πολιτικὸς στίχος Poetry: Language, Metre and Discourse (University of Ghent, 2015)

In this contribution, I offer a summary of my 2015 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Ghent on the language and metre of Late Medieval Greek πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry as they pertain to information structure.

The Particle γάρ: From Ancient Greek Sentence Connector to Blatant Line Filler? A Case-study on the Late Medieval Greek Chronicle of Morea

Ancient Greek is widely regarded as a language with an extraordinary number of so-called “Wackernagel P2 particles” such as γάρ, δ(έ), and μέν, which serve a multitude of discourse functions. From the post-Classical period on, however, these small words gradually lose their importance in discourse and die out. This is reflected in the interest of scholars: while there are many studies on particles in older stages of Greek, not much research has been conducted on the particles in late medieval Greek (LMG; twelfth to fifteenth centuries). At this stage of the Greek language, the P2 particles are acknowledged to no longer be part of the living spoken language. Nonetheless, some of these small words still turn up in texts written in the vernacular. Since most LMG vernacular literature is composed in the metre of the 15-syllabic πολιτικὸς στίχος (vernacular prose being extremely scarce in this period), these occurrences are traditionally explained by appealing to metrical and/or stylistic reasons: the particles constitute archaizing relics merely inserted to give a classicizing flavour to the text, or are even used “metri causa”, simply to achieve the required number of syllables. In this note, I present a case-study on the “explanatory” particle γάρ (“for”) in the Chronicle of Morea, the best-known verse chronicle of the Greek Middle Ages. I show that γάρ is more than a blatant line filler. First, γάρ is not at all distributed at random, but consistently occupies P2 and thus obeys the so-called “Law of Wackernagel”, as the particles in Ancient Greek do. Moreover, γάρ can still exert a clear discourse function, albeit often a different one than in Ancient Greek.

Clitic Doubling in Vernacular Medieval Greek

This paper provides the first in-depth study of clitic doubling in vernacular Medieval Greek. First, it is shown that the four-part typology (topicalization; right-dislocation; backgrounding; left-dislocation) recently developed on the basis of Modern Greek is perfectly applicable to vernacular Medieval Greek. Moreover, clitic doubling serves the same pragmatic function in Medieval Greek as in many modern spoken languages: it marks an object as the topic of the utterance (as opposed to the focus). For this purpose, the notion of ‘topic’ is clearly defined and distinguished from the concept of (referential) ‘givenness’. Special attention is paid to the distribution of the clitic pronouns, as their position is diagnostic for the topic/focus distinction. Innovatively, the frequent occurrence of clitic doubling in my corpus is associated with the oral discourse which the vernacular texts are acknowledged to adopt. In this regard, two other constructions are discussed: dislocated genitives and dislocated subjects.

Δηλώσω σοι γὰρ τὰς αὐτοῦ πράξεις (DAG1.13) / A note on the order of clitic pronouns and particles in the Grottaferrata Digenis Akritis

Abstract The Digenis Akritis is preserved in two important manuscripts: Escorial and Grottaferrata. Whereas the language of the former is traditionally considered vernacular or even vulgar, the scribe of the Grottaferrata manuscript is said to employ an archaizing style. The frequent occurrence of clitic particles like δέ, γάρ, μέν and οὖν is one of the more prominent archaizing features. In Ancient Greek, clitic particles and clitic pronouns tend to cluster together in second position in accordance with Wackernagel’s Law. In this note, we examine the various distributional patterns of clitic particles co-occurring with clitic pronouns in the Grottaferrata manuscript.We argue that despite the occurrence of some apparently classical clusterings, the distribution of clitic pronouns and particles is clearly governed by contemporary rules.