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Article published In:
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 19:1 (2018) ► pp.55–91

The evolution of the Ancient Greek deverbal pragmatic markers áge, íthi and phére

| Ghent University, Belgium

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.

Keywords: Ancient Greek, imperatives, illocution, pragmatic markers, pragmaticalization, propositional attitude
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
Published online: 10 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.16009.zak
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