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Nach einer Einführung zu den griechischen Literatursprachen zwischen dem 8. und 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. geht dieser Beitrag den verschiedenen Formen und Funktionen der Verwendung von Dialekten und "foreigner talk" im griechischen Drama des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. nach. Dabei lassen sich große Unterschiede für die Gattungen Tragödie und Komödie feststellen: Durch die Dosierung der lyrischen Partien der Tragödie werden diese von den in Attisch gehaltenen Dialogpartien unterschieden und ihnen wird eine herausgehobene, erhabene Bedeutung zugewiesen, die nicht allzu viel Fremdheit ausstrahlen soll. Dialekte und "foreigner talk" in der Komödie dagegen markieren Fremdheit und können vielfältige Funktionen erfüllen – vom Verweis auf sprachlichen Realismus bis hin zu kritischen, komischen oder parodistischen Zwecken.
This paper presents an overview of the adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives in Greek, focusing on its use in Greek academic and diagnostic settings. A summary of the properties of the Greek language and the concomitant challenges these language-specific properties posed to MAIN adaptation are presented along with a summary of published studies with monolingual Greek-speaking children and bilingual children with Greek as L2, with and without Developmental Language Disorder.
On the early development of aspect in greek and russian child language, a comparative analysis
(2003)
The category of aspect is grammaticized in both Greek and Russian opposing perfective and imperfective verb forms in all inflectional categories except the nonpast (‘present’). Despite these similarities there are important differences in the way the aspectual systems function in the two languages. While in Greek nearly all verbs oppose a perfective to a given imperfective grammatical form, Russian aspect is more strongly lexicalized with pairs of imperfective and perfective lexemes not only differing aspectually, but also as far as their lexical meanings are concerned. This is especially true of perfective verbs formed by prefixes as compared to their imperfective bases. Thus, in pairs of prefixed and unprefixed dynamic verbs, the derived prefixed (perfective) member has a telic meaning while its unprefixed (imperfective) counterpart is atelic (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. jest’ (IPF) ‘to eat’). Such derived perfective verbs may in turn be “secondarily” imperfectivized by suffixation furnishing the only “true” perfective/imperfective pairs of verbs (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. sjedat’ (IPF) ‘to eat up’ (iterative)). “Secondary” imperfectives do not occur in our child data.
In this pilot study, we will analyze the tense-aspect-mood forms of the 20 most frequent verbs with equivalent meanings occurring in the longitudinal audiotaped data of a Greek and a Russian boy between 2;1 and 2;3 (their entire lexical inventories comprise approx. 100 verbs each).
We adopt a constructivist perspective on the development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language and will show that in spite of a broad inventory of imperfective and perfective verb forms to be found in the speech of both children aspect has not yet developed into a generalized grammatical category, but is strongly dependent on aktionsart (stative/dynamic, telic/atelic) in both languages. While this results in a strong preference for perfective verb forms of telic verbs and of imperfective forms of atelic ones in the speech of the Greek boy, the Russian child tends to use the unmarked members.
Children […] growing up with highly inflected languages such as Modern Greek will frequently hear different grammatical forms of a given lexeme used in different grammatical and semantic-pragmatic contexts. In spite of the fact that the Greek noun is not as highly inflected as the verb, acquisition of nominal inflection of this inflecting-fusional language is quite complex, comprising the three categories of case, number, and gender. As is usual in this type of language, the formation of case-number forms obeys different patterns that apply to largely arbitrary classes of nominal lexemes partially based on gender. Further, frequency of the occurrence of the three gender classes and case-number forms of nouns greatly differs in spoken Greek, regarding both the types and tokens. […] [A] child learning an inflecting-fusional language like Greek must construct different inflectional patterns depending not only on parts of speech but also on subclasses within a given part of speech, such as gender classes of nouns and inflectional classes within or (exceptionally) across genders. It is therefore to be expected that the early development of case and number distinctions will apply to specific nouns and subclasses of nouns rather than the totality of Greek nouns. The two main theoretical approaches of morphological development that will be discussed in the present paper are the usage-based approach and the pre- and protomorphology approach.
Studies of syntax in first language acquisition have so far concentrated on the propositional side of the sentence, i.e. on the occurrence and interplay of semantic roles like agent, benefactive, objective, etc. and their syntactic expression. The modality constituent, however, has received little attention in the study of child language. This may be due in part to the impetus more recent research in this field has received from studies of the acquisition of English, a language with poor verb morphology as compared to synthetic languages. The research to be presented in this paper is concerned with an early stage of the acquisition of Modern Greek as a first language, a language with a particularly rich verb morphology. Since modality, aspect, and tense are obligatorily marked on the main verb in Mod. Greek, this language offers an excellent opportunity for studying the development of these fundamental categories of verbal grammar at an earlier stage than in more analytic languages. [...] As this paper is concerned with the semantic categories of verbal grammar mentioned above as weIl as with their formal expression, only utterances containing a verb will be considered. For reasons of space we shall further limit ourselves to those utterances containing a main verb. Such utterances divide into two classes, modal and non-modal. [...] In spite of Calbert's claim (Calbert 1975) that there are no strictly non-modal expressions, affirmative and negative statements as well as questions not containing a modal verb will be considered as non-modal. As will be shown below, modal and non-modal expressions are formally differentiated at the stage of language acquisition studied.
It is my intention to make two major points in this paper: 1. The first has to do with finding a frame within which the modal expressions of one particular Ancient IE [Indoeuropean] language – I have chosen Classical Greek – can be best described. I shall try to point out that the regularities which we find in these expressions must depend on an underlying principle, represented by abstract structures. These structures are semanto-syntactic, which means that the semantic properties or bundles of properties are arranged not in a linear order but in a hierarchical order, analogous to a bracketing in a PS structure. The abstract structures we propose have, of course, a very tentative character. They can only be accepted as far as evidence for them can be furnished. 2. My second point has to do with the modal verb forms that were the object of the studies of most Indo-Europeanists. If in the innermost bracket of a semanto-syntactic structure two semantic properties or bundles of properties can be exchanged without any further change in the total structure, and if this change is correlated with a change in verbal mood forms and nothing else, then I think we are faced with a case where these forms can be said to have a meaning of their own. I shall also try to show how these meanings are to be understood as bundles of features rather than as unanalyzed terms. In my final remarks: I shall try to outline the bearing these views have on comparative IE linguistics.
Alexopoulou (2008) argues that Greek provides new evidence for the concept of binding illusions that was hypothesized by Fox and Sauerland (1996). Of special interest from my perspective is Alexopoulou’s argument that binding illusions arise not only with existential and universal quantifiers, but also with negative and interrogative quantifiers. The purpose of this note is to speculate on how to account for these kinds of binding illusions semantically building on Alexopoulou’s argument. In the following I refer to Alexopoulou’s (2008) paper as BIRG (Binding Illusions and Resumption in Greek) and to Clitic Left-Dislocation as CLLD. BIRG’s argument is based on the generalization concerning CLLD in Greek. Generally, a left-dislocated noun phrase cannot bind a pronoun in its clause in Greek.
Rezension zu Melanie Möller: Talis oratio - qualis vita. Zur Theorie und Praxis mimetischer Verfahren in der griechisch-römischen Literaturkritik. Heidelberg (Winter) 2004 (= Bibliothek der klassischen Altertumswissenschaften. Neue Folge, 2. Reihe, Bd. 113). 396 S.
Wie der Mann, so das Buch. Oder, anders herum: Der Stil ist der Mensch. Diesen Gemeinspruch erhebt die vorliegende Monographie zur Problemformel der Hermeneutik. Vorweg sei festgestellt: Die Verfasserin legt einen Denkweg frei, der die historische und systematische Darstellung der griechisch-römischen Literaturkritik übersteigt, indem für den hermeneutischen Diskurs unserer Gegenwart kontrastierende Anschauungen bereitgestellt werden. Leitend ist die Fragestellung: Inwieweit zeigt sich in der Rede die Individualität des Redners, so dass aus dieser jene besser zu verstehen ist? Oder ist das, was als Individualität sich zeigt, als objektives Merkmal der Rede einzustufen, das mit der lebensgeschichtlichen Individualität des Redners nicht zusammenhängt?
It has often been noticed that one syntactic argument position can be realized by elements which seem to realize different thematic roles. This is notably the case with the external argument position of verbs of change of state which licenses volitional agents, instruments or natural forces/causers, showing the generality and abstractness of the external argument relation. (1) a. John broke the window (Agent) b. The hammer broke the window (Instrument) c. The storm broke the window (Causer) In order to capture this generality, Van Valin & Wilkins (1996) and Ramchand (2003) among others have proposed that the thematic role of the external argument position is in fact underspecified. The relevant notion is that of an effector (in Van Valin & Wilkins) or of an abstract causer/initiator (in Ramchand). In this paper we argue against a total underspecification of the external argument relation. While we agree that (1b) does not instantiate an instrument theta role in subject position, we argue that a complete underspecification of the external theta-position is not feasible, but that two types of external theta roles have to be distinguished, Agents and Causers. Our arguments are based on languages where Agents and Causers show morpho-syntactic independence (section 2.1) and the behavior of instrument subjects in English, Dutch, German and Greek (section 2.2 and 3). We show that instrument subjects are either Agent or Causer like. In section (4) we give an analysis how arguments realizing these thematic notions are introduced into syntax.