Ancient Greek. Languages of the World/Materials

Ancient Greek provides us with a vivid picture of dialectal variation, which is quite unusual for the highly standardized literary languages of the antiquity. The richness of literary and non-literary sources makes it possible to give an in-depth description of diachronic and diatopic variation. Besides, peculiarities especially in the verbal system as well as in clause linkage and subordination make ancient Greek extremly interesting from a typological point of view. While the standard handbooks of Ancient Greek provide us with highly reliable descriptions, many of its typological peculiarities have hardly been brought to the attention of students of linguistic typology who are not specialized in Classics. In this grammatical sketch the author will give a description of the standard Classical language (V century BC), trying to highlight aspects of general interest; data on dialectal variation and on historically different periods will be given in the discussion. Topics discussed in the book include: (1) the socio-linguistic situation of Ancient Greece and of the Aegean area; (2) historical and dialectal classification of literary and non-literary sources; (3) phonology; (4) morphology: word formation; parts of speech system; inflectional morphology; (5) syntax of the simple sentence: word order within the sentence and the noun phrase; use of cases; verbal voice; TAM system; clitics; (6) parataxis and hypotaxis; use of the nominal forms of the verb; types of subordinate clauses; (7) late syntactic developments in the koiné (from IV century BC onwards).