The Landscape of Greek Quantifiers

In this article, we study the structures that the Greek language employs to express quantification. By Greek, I am referring to the contemporary Greek spoken in the countries of Greece and Cyprus (an estimated total of 14 million speakers), and Greeks in diaspora (an estimated 5–6 million). It has long been customary, especially in the study of classics, to use the term ‘Greek’ to refer to the ancient language – and for a while, linguists referred to themodern language as ‘Modern Greek’, or Koine Modern Greek (Koinή NeoellZnikή; Babiniotis and Kontos 1967). However, ‘as a living language, contemporary Greek does not need to be qualified by an adjective which implies that it is somehow secondary to the ancient language’ (Holton et al. 1997: xiii). For this reason, it gradually became standard practice in linguistics to use Greek to refer to the modern language, adding the adjective ancient or modern only when these chronological stages need to be distinguished. Greek is an Indo-European language, the sole descendant of Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek exhibited variation in its dialects – which, however, were always mutually intelligible and in later stages (e.g. in later antiquity and theHellenistic period) developed into a common language koine (see among others Horrocks (1997)). It is now the standard view that ‘the vast majority of Greek speakers now speak a common language with only relatively minor dialectal variations. The only exception to this is the Greek Cypriots, many of whom ordinarily speak a dialect which, although linguistically close to standard Greek, presents some significant differences’ (Holton et al. 1997: xiii). Until 1976, two versions of Greek co-existed: demotic (dZmotikή), which was the actual spoken language at least since the turn of the twentieth century; and katharévousa (kayareύousa), a hybrid made up of lexical, morphological, and