Trends in Classics – Greek and Latin Linguistics – Serie

The studies presented in this volume deal with numerous and often undervalued aspects of multilingualism in Ancient Europe and the Mediterranean. Primarily, but not exclusively, they explore the impact of the great transnational languages, Greek and Latin, on numerous indigenous languages: the latter mostly disappeared apart from a number of written texts, often not well comprehensible, but at the same time provided the dominant languages with loanwords, some of them destined to enduring success. Moreover, Greek and Latin were remarkably affected by their mutual contact, with the complication that Greek was notoriously far from monolithic, and in some areas its different dialects intermingled with each other and with the local languages. The case studies of this volume were conducted in the frame of a European HERA research on Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Ancient Europe, which covered a number of very diverse areas, with an emphasis on Sicily and Southern Italy, Illyria, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, Egypt and Asia Minor (also in medieval and modern times). This book makes indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in multilingualism and language contact in Ancient Europe.

The present volume collects contributions given at the First Postclassical Greek Conference Cologne (March 24–26, 2021), dealing with different topics related to the Greek language of the Postclassical period. In particular, it addresses the following issues: diachrony of the Greek language (e.g. as regards word order, negation, semantic shifts, counterfactuals); standardization processes; dialect convergence and linguistic change; linguistic innovation vs. reuse in literary Greek; layout of ancient texts in manuscripts. The papers include further elaborations with respect to their discussion within the activities of the DFG scientific network on Postclassical Greek (March 2022 – Feb. 2024) organized by the editors. The thirteen contributions aim at giving the readers new insights into this extremely complex and internally diverse stage of Greek, taking into consideration literary and documentary sources, New Testament Greek and inscriptions. Moreover, they show the productivity of the combination of philological and linguistic approaches when analyzing ancient languages.

This volume presents the first comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of (in)subordination in Post-Classical Greek (III BCE – VI AD) from a modern linguistic perspective. The contributions provide new findings into the syntax of the Post-Classical Greek sentence along four main dimensions. First, several studies investigate the diachrony of subordinate and insubordinate clause structures, both in Post-Classical Greek and the history of Greek more generally. Second, contributions demarcate the influence of language contact on the continuity and change of clausal strategies. Third, the diverse syntactic and pragmatic factors involved in different types of finite and non-finite subordination are detailed. Fourth, the phenomenon of subordination as found in specific text types and collections is contextualized, incorporating insights from historical sociolinguistics. This book aims to be a reference point not only to Greek scholars working on the Post-classical period and the specific corpora addressed in the volume, but also to general linguists interested in the syntax of (in)subordination and the application of modern linguistic approaches to historical languages.

Mark Janse has spent an entire career being a philhellene. His passion for the Greek language has carried him from the inner workings of the Homeric hexameter to eschatology in Aristophanes, and from diglossia in the Ancient Greek world to clitic doubling in the history of Greek. Among his broad spectrum of interest, two things stand out: one is his enthusiasm for variation and change across time and space in the Hellenic universe; another is his love for the Asia Minor dialects of Cappadocia.This two-volume book, which is intended as a tribute to Mark from his colleagues, addresses precisely these two topics: the first volume has a broader scope, and addresses different types of varieties in Ancient and Medieval Greek, such as dialects, regiolects and idiolects, also including indepth studies of specific features. The second volume brings together a variety of studies that underline Mark's contribution to Cappadocian and more broadly the Asia Minor Greek dialects. While most contributions focus specifically on Cappadocian, some scholars look into other modern Greek dialects, including Pontic and Cypriot Greek.

There is a long-standing debate over the relation of historical linguistics and classical philology, especially within the purview of the renewed interest in it during the last decades and the recent trends that characterize philological and linguistic studies. Ever since its appearance in the nineteenth century, the history of this debate testifies to a turbulent coexistence and fertile collaboration of the two disciplines, but at times also moving along centrifugal paths. The essays in this volume address this debate and cover various aspects of linguistic and philological research of Greek and Latin, moving in the middle ground where language, linguistics and philology crosscut and cross-fertilize each other highlighting the application of linguistic theory to the study of classical texts and drawing on fields such as syntactic theory and pragmatics, historical semantics and the lexicon, reconstruction and etymology, dialectology, editorial practices, the use of corpora, and other interdisciplinary approaches that function as hinges between philology and linguistics.

A striking feature of Latin elegiac verse is its very free word order. One gets the impression that the word order is just random or that the rules of Latin syntax have been suspended for metrical convenience. Combining ample philological documentation with an overall theoretical stance, this book argues that these impressions are wrong and proceeds to analyze the syntax of Latin verse as a coherent system generated by the application of a small set of derivational rules. While these rules are independently available syntactic mechanisms like scrambling, stranding and verb raising, their systematically regular application both at the clausal and at the phrasal level is remarkable. Not only complete constituents but also partial constituents are constantly attracted towards the left edge of the phrase that contains them. The cumulative effect of this is to narrow the extent and attenuate the weight of the nuclear assertion, which reduces its processing domain and the span of its prosodic correlate. This book will be of interest both to Classicists and to linguists: it aims to solve an old problem in Classical philology, while at the same time working out a configurational syntax for a language with extreme free word order.

Research on the ancient Greek dialects traditionally focusses on the grammatical description of these regional varieties. But dialects are more than geographically conditioned varieties of a language: in antiquity no less than in modern times, dialects may assume a range of social meanings, as speakers associate specific forms of speech with communicative situations and purposes that are independent of geographical location as such. This volume aims to complement research on the grammars of the ancient Greek dialects by exploring sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic dimensions of dialect variation in the Greek world. For example, what factors determine the choice of a given variety, in situations of competition between different dialects—including competition between Koiné Greek and regional dialects? How are regional dialects represented in literature, and what do ancient sources tell us about the para-linguistic associations evoked by the use of a given dialect? How do ancient scholars and grammarians evaluate dialect usage—including ‘unexpected’ dialect features in literary texts? How do social and historical changes impact on the relationship between epichoric and literary dialects?