Καλημέρα, kalimera or kalhmera?

Although language attitudes are frequently investigated, how these attitudes change over time is studied less frequently, despite providing an interesting window into the link between attitudes and ideologies. Conducted some twenty years since the first studies on this topic, the current study provides an updated perspective into language attitudes toward the use of Roman-alphabeted Greek (henceforth, Greeklish) in emails and SMS messages exchanged between Greek native speakers. Adapting the matched guise methodology commonly used in language attitude research to visual stimuli, we collected data from 60 participants of different ages and genders. Overall, their attitudes toward Greeklish were markedly negative, confirming negative attitudes already expressed twenty years prior but also extending them. We propose that technological and demographic but also ideological factors underlie the negative attitudes toward Greeklish expressed by Greek native speakers today.

Penelope’s αἰνοπαθῆ (σ 201)

The Homeric hapax αἰνοπαθής ‘terribly suffering’ has been adduced as evidence for ancient processes of Indo-European word-formation. In particular, the vocalism of the root, α of -παθ-, would derive from *n̥, an ablaut grade conditioned by the accent on the ending -ής (a “hysterokinetic” s-stem adjective). I reexamine the passage where the word is found and argue the vocalism of -παθής reflects not an archaism but an innovation in Homeric Greek. Using this reanalysis as a point of departure, I review recent literature on s-stem adjectives in Greek, Vedic, and Proto-Indo-European, disputing that the evidence suffices for a hysterokinetic reconstruction. I propose that the PIE accent was borne on the first member of these exocentric compounds as we find it in earliest Old Indic, in the prehistory of Greek, and in certain Greek archaisms.

The Homeric Dependency Lexicon

This paper presents the Homeric Dependency Lexicon (HoDeL), a new resource with a user-friendly interface facilitating the study of Homeric verbs and dependents. HoDeL was induced from the analytical layer of AGDT 2.0, extracting all dependents tagged as SBJ, OBJ, PNOM, and OCOMP with a set of SQL queries. The paper illustrates HoDeL functionalities and shows how they can be employed by researchers to answer specific research questions about the Homeric language. Introducing the uses of HoDeL offers the opportunity to reexamine some crucial, though frequently underestimated, methodological challenges concerning annotated corpora and resources derived from them that relate to the linguistic theories underlying annotations and error propagation. It is argued that the careful documentation of how linguistic resources were created, what data they contain, and how they can be queried through their dedicated interfaces is essential to lay the groundwork for users’ investigations.

The development of the Imperfect in Ancient Greek from simple past to imperfective as a blocking phenomenon

This article seeks to combine the viewpoints of formal semantics and pragmatics, typology, historical linguistics, and philology, in order to give a diachronic overview of the semantic and pragmatic changes observable for the Imperfect indicative within the recorded history Greek. Since its development does not adhere to typologically expected stages of semantic change, I provide a pragmatic account by taking into consideration not only the Imperfect but also the rest of the past-tense system of Greek, namely the Aorist and Perfect. With this holistic approach, I am able to motivate a development that is otherwise typologically anomalous.

Greek polydefinites revisited

This article focuses on the interpretation of the adjectives that appear in Greek polydefinite DP s. It provides empirical support to the established position that restrictive modifiers are preferred in polydefinite environments (Kolliakou 1995). At the same time, it shows that non-restrictively modified polydefinites are not excluded by grammar (Manolessou 2000). To reconcile the facts, a novel syntactic analysis of polydefiniteness as involving modification by either restrictive or non-restrictive reduced relative clauses is formulated. We extend Alexopoulou’s (2006) analysis of resumption in full relatives to polydefinites and defend that what looks like a preadjectival definite article is a resumptive clitic pronoun that values the unvalued definiteness feature of a null relative complementizer. We further defend that, while the prenominal definite article is interpreted as d-linked, the resumptive clitic is a dependent expression that is interpreted as a referentially bound anaphora.

A multifactorial analysis of differential agent marking in Herodotus

Passive agents in ancient Greek exhibit a well-known alternation between dative case and prepositional phrase. It has long been recognized that grammatical aspect plays a crucial role in this alternation: dative agents preponderate among aspectually perfect predicates, prepositional phrase agents elsewhere. Although the importance of grammatical aspect is undeniable, it is not the only factor that determines the realization of passive agents. The identification of other factors has proven challenging, however, not least because previous researchers have lacked methods for assessing the relative importance of the determinants that influence the realization of agent phrases. In this paper, I use Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression to provide a multifactorial account of differential agent marking in Herodotus, according to which the realization of passive agent phrases is conditioned by the relationship between semantic role and referential prominence (Haspelmath 2021). Dative agents are favored in clauses where semantic role and referential prominence are aligned (i.e., the agent is referentially prominent or the patient is referentially non-prominent). By contrast, prepositional phrase agents are more likely when semantic role and referential prominence are at odds (i.e., the patient is referentially prominent or the agent is referentially non-prominent).