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Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles: New perspectives
Edited by Chiara Fedriani and Andrea Sansó
[Studies in Language Companion Series 186] 2017
► pp. 125–150

Chapter 4
A corpus-based approach to functional markers in Greek

Exploring the role of position

| National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
The paper attempts to explore the role of position in Greek by examining how positional preferences for markers correlate with their functions in the language. A large number of these items are investigated in four sub-corpora of academic texts, newspaper opinion articles, Parliament speeches and radio and TV interviews (1 million words in total), drawn from the Corpus of Greek Texts. The findings suggest that items that can be described as discourse and pragmatic markers are attracted by first position, whereas modal markers tend to appear in third position and second position is reserved for grammaticalized items. The corpus-based approach followed seems to offer a useful means of delimiting the broad class of items involved in Greek.
Keywords: corpora, functional markers, grammaticalization, Greek, position
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Functional markers in Greek
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Positional preferences of Greek functional markers
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 13 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.186.05gou
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