Events

Dr. Filip De Decker: A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of the Augment Use and Absence in the Oldest Greek Literary Texts (1300-400 BC)

A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of the Augment Use and Absence in the Oldest Greek Literary Texts (1300-400 BC)
Dr Filip De Decker

In Classical Philology and Indo-European linguistics, the term augment is used to refer to the prefix *e that is added to past tense forms of the indicative and is only attested in Indo-Iranian (stretching back until the 2 nd Millennium BC), Greek, Armenian (attested as of the 5 th century AD) and Phrygian (extinct language dating back to the 7 th century BC). In Classical Greek prose (5 th and 4 th century BC), this prefix is mandatory: lúomen means "we loosen" and elúomen "we loosened", but in the earliest Greek texts this marker was more often absent than not: it is almost completely missing in the Mycenaean prose tablets (13 th century BC) and the forms without augment are decidedly more numerous in epic Greek (written down beginning
of the 8 th century BC). For many scholars, the augment use in poetry is only metrically motivated, whereas other studies have focused on morphologic, syntactic and semantic factors, but an overall study has not been performed and most studies have been limited to Homer. My project intends to fill this void. In this presentation, I give an overview of previous scholarship, present preliminary findings (facts and figures, and rules and constraints
governing the augment use) on the augment in epic Greek (Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns) and will analyse some examples. After the Greek of epic, my research will proceed to the elegy and lyric poetry, inscriptions (prose inscriptions until the 5 th century BC and verse inscriptions), non-Attic prose (Herodotos) and the choral passages in Greek tragedy. In a final stage, a selection from the Alexandrinian and Imperial epicists will be analysed.