Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek

Download or read book Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek written by Klaas Bentein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Greek is commonly considered a 'synthetic' or 'inflectional' language, that is, a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. Nevertheless, already at the earliest stages of the language one finds traces of multi-word 'periphrastic' constructions similar to those in the modern European languages, as in ἦ*n *g*i*nό#u*e*n*a, 'it was happening', or ἔ*y*e*i ἀ*t*i#uά*s*a*4, 'he has dishonoured'. Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek offers a systematic investigation of periphrastic constructions with the verbs 'to be' and 'to have' based on an extensive corpus of texts, ranging from the eighth century BC to the eighth century AD. It clarifies the notions of 'verbal periphrasis' and 'adjectival periphrasis' from a theoretical point of view, and offers a broad introduction to a selection of recent advancements in linguistics. It includes a diachronic analysis which investigates constructions in all three main aspectual domains-perfect aspect, imperfective aspect, and perfective aspect-combining a qualitative with a quantitative approach. In doing so, the volume presents a substantial contribution to our understanding of the ancient Greek verbal system and its development over time.