Diachronic, Typological, and Areal Aspects of Converbs

The aim of this paper is to analyze Ancient Greek participles in the light of the notion of converbs. In particular, the paper will focus on conjunct participles, the use of which essentially overlaps with the functions of converbs, both semantically and syntactically. After pointing out some problems in the classification of conjunct participles in Ancient Greek and giving an overview of the notion of converbs and of their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features, conjunct participles are classified as converbs, according to their different aspectual/temporal stems. This analysis leads to the identification of three different types of conjunct participles, i.e. coordinative, clause modifier and predicate modifier.