Description
Despite the difficulties of reconstructing the grammar of a dead language, studying Ancient Greek offers new insights for linguistic theory. The morphological complexity of the Greek verb with its highly intricate inflectional system provides a valuable basis for an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms which regulate the functioning of a language. Studies on the Ancient Greek verb have also contributed significantly to the reconstruction of the Indo-European language since the early history of Linguistics in the nineteenth century. The conservative features preserved in the oldest stages of Greek allow us to rely on a solid basis to which every linguist must refer in investigating a model of the Proto-Indo-European verb. The present volume contains the papers presented at the 8th International Meeting on Greek Linguistics (GL8) held in Agrigento in October 2009, hosted by the University of Palermo, Italy. The conference was part of a series of biennial international meetings on Ancient Greek Linguistics organized in Italy since 1993. It was entitled `The Greek Verb: Morphology, Syntax, Semantics’ and was aimed at discussing trending issues on the Ancient Greek verbal system from a perspective both synchronic and diachronic. The contributions of this book analyze phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic phenomena from various areas of grammar pertaining to the verb, using a large corpus which ranges mostly from Homeric to Classical Greek. There is diversity in the topics covered, but the approach which unifies the volume is that of challenging traditional divisions and rigid boundaries between different levels of analysis, focusing on fundamental issues in theoretically-based linguistics from a broad perspective: morphosyntactic and syntactic variation, phonological, morphological, semantic and pragmatic aspects of grammatical phenomena. The papers also adopt different theoretical frameworks, both synchronic and diachronic, and develop diverse approaches varying from the cognitive (prototype theory), and the formal (Distributed Morphology), to the pragmatic-functional, and the historical-comparative. This volume provides a current overview of some work on Ancient Greek Linguistics, setting forth interesting topics for further research and drawing more attention to the contribution which historical linguistics and the study of dead languages can give to the improvement and growth of linguistic theories, toward a deeper comprehension of the language system.
