Interlocked life cycles of counterfactual mood forms from Archaic to Classical Greek
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Ezra la Roi
Abstract
Based on a corpus study of 2074 occurrences in Archaic (424) and Classical (1650) Greek, I offer a unified explanation for the temporal reference extensions of counterfactual mood forms in declarative, interrogative, wish and de-activated illocutions (i.e. subordinate clauses). I propose a diachronic trajectory (life cycle) for counterfactual mood forms from past to present and future reference. Extensions are constrained diachronically by grammatical aspect (e.g. imperfect facilitating extensions to present reference more than the aorist or pluperfect), and actionality of the state of affairs in clausal context (atelic states of affairs enabling temporal extensions), as well as synchronically by illocutionary usage, collocations with temporal adverbs and common ground knowledge (i.e. temporal location known or not). This trajectory explains the replacements of the inherited counterfactual optative by the counterfactual indicative, because their life cycles are interlocked: in Archaic Greek the counterfactual optative had already extended from its original past to present and future reference and is losing its counterfactuality, whereas the counterfactual indicative referred only to the past and sometimes the present. In Classical Greek, temporal extensions of the counterfactual indicative are continued across different aspects, clause types and illocutions at different rates of change and the counterfactual optative is filtered out of the system.
© 2022 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Altisländisch vatr neben vatn, färöisch vatur neben vatn ‚Wasser‘
- Alternative etymologies for two British Celtic verbal forms
- The Luwic inflection of proper names, the Hittite dative-locative of i- and iia̯ -stems, and the Proto-Anatolian allative
- Sobre el origen de la escansión larga de la sílaba reduplicada de ἵημι
- Luwian Tarhunaza-, Cilician Τροκοναζας, Τρικοναζας
- Take up your arms
- Hermes Ἀργεϊφόντης and Agni bhā́r̥jīka
- Une innovation divine
- The mixed aorist subjunctive in Classical Armenian
- A note on Greek ἰκμάς
- Greek τηλεκλυτός ‘far-famed’ and its Welsh comparanda
- Interlocked life cycles of counterfactual mood forms from Archaic to Classical Greek
- The root of all gluttony
- Artemis Orthia
- Linguistic evidence for Kuṣāṇa trade routes
- Variation and change in the formal marking of Khotanese I
