Meeting description

Ancient Greek and Latin were certainly among the best-studied languages a hundred years ago, biasing our understanding of grammatical categories and structures. In the realm of modern linguistics the perspective was shifted towards modern languages, which gave rise to an interesting situation: the grammars and dictionaries of Classical languages are still among the most detailed linguistic descriptions available, but these languages are severely underrepresented in modern linguistic research. This state of affairs offers a twofold challenge:

- What can we learn from languages such as Ancient Greek for the generalizations gained within modern linguistic frameworks?
- How can we advance our understanding of Ancient Greek by applying the analytic tools of modern linguistic theory?

These challenges were taken up by several studies in the recent years that shed light on typological peculiarities of Ancient Greek, such as the metrical structure, syllabification and accentuation (Kiparsky 1967, 1973, 2003, Warburton 1970, Steriade 1982, 1988, Sauzet 1989, Golston 1989, Devine & Stephens 1994, Noyer 1997, Golston & Riad 2000, 2005, Gunkel 2011, 2014), the prosodic behavior of clitics and their relevance for the syntax-phonology interface (Taylor 1996, Revithiadou 2014, Goldstein 2016), the emergence of DP structures (Manolessou 2000, Manolessou and Horrocks 2007, Guardiano 2012), the discontinuous noun phrases (Devine and Stephens 2000, Golston & Agbayani 2010), the syntax of preposition in relation to case and verb structure (Horrocks 1980, 1981, Luraghi 2003, Acedo-Matellán 2016), voice and case theoretical issues (Grestenberger 2014, 2016, Anagnostopoulou and Sevdali 2015, Michelioudakis 2015), the syntax of the infinitive (Philippaki-Warburton & Catsimali 1997, Spyropoulos 2005, Sevdali 2009), negation and polarity (Horrocks 2014, Chatzopoulou 2018), word order and information structure (Taylor 1990, 1994, Dik 1995, 2007, Matić 2003), and many other issues of relevance for modern linguistics.

The reason for initiating this workshop series is to establish a network of linguists applying analytical tools of current linguistic theories to the research of Ancient Greek. This aims encompasses any framework of modern linguistics at any layer of grammar, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.



References


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