The evolution of the Ancient Greek deverbal pragmatic markers áge, íthi and phére
In this paper, I look at the Ancient Greek expressions áge, íthi and phére, which are all usually translated as ‘come (on)’. After discussing some existing accounts of these items, I look at their structural – syntactic properties and argue that they can be regarded as pragmaticalized imperatives. Then, I propose a new interpretation of their function – on this analysis, they can be regarded as conversational “boosters”, increasing the degree of strength of the illocutionary point of the utterance. Finally, I look at their diachronic development – in the corpus under consideration, áge is gradually replaced by íthi as the expression used with other imperatives, while phére develops as the preferred expression for use with non-imperative directive utterances.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Earlier accounts
- 3.
Áge, íthi and phére as grammaticalized imperatives
- 3.1The structural criteria
- 3.2The semantic criteria
- 3.2.1Conceptual > procedural
- 3.2.2Non-subjective > (inter)subjective
- 4.The semantics of áge, íthi and phére revisited
- 5.
Áge, íthi and phére: Synonyms or not?
- 6.Conclusions
-
Acknowledgments
- Notes
-
References
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► pp. 2 ff.

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