‘Finite’ infinitives in Ancient Greek

The Aorist Infinitives in -εειν in Early Greek Hexameter Poetry

This paper examines the distribution of thematic infinitive endings in early Greek epic in the context of the long-standing debate about the transmission and development of Homeric epic diction. There are no aorist infinitives in -έμεν in Homer which would scan as ᴗ ᴗ − before a consonant or caesura (for example *βαλέμεν): instead we find unexplained forms in -έειν (for example βαλέειν). It is ...

The Question of Root Infinitives in Early Child Greek

It is well known that children acquiring Germanic and Romance languages go through an early stage at which they produce declarative sentences with a Root Infinitive (cf. (1)) which would be ungrammatical in the adult language (Stern & Stern 1928, Weverink 1989, Pierce 1992, Wexler 1994). For languages outside of these language families, little work has been done on such Root Infinitives. In the...

Case Attraction in Ancient Greek

Case attraction has stood as a puzzling, and elusive, oddity of older Indo-European languages. This paper focuses on attraction in Ancient Greek, establishing both the regularity of the operation and its underlying motivation. A novel method is proposed for grounding case in terms of a feature-based representation of agentivity properties, loosely based on Dowty’s proto-role theory, but reformu...

Dreams in ancient Greek Medicine.

Dreams preoccupied the Greek and Roman world in antiquity, therefore they had a prominent role in social, philosophical, religious, historical and political life of those times. They were considered as omens and prophetic signs of future events in private and public life, and that was particularly accentuated when elements of actions which took place in the plot of dreams were associated direct...

Space in Ancient Greek Literature : Studies in Ancient