Search results for " realis vs irrealis marking"

Modality and Injunctive in Homeric Greek: The role of epistemic particles and adverbs in counterfactual constructions

2020

Structurally, unaugmented aorists and imperfects belong to the oldest layer of verbal forms attested in Greek, which continue the so-called Indo-European ‘injunctive’. The latter was inflectionally underspecified as regards verbal categories such as tense or mood (Hoffmann 1967; Kiparsky 1968). Thus, the question arises as to how the attitude of the speaker toward the content of his utterance was expressed. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of epistemic particles and adverbs co-occurring with injunctives in the Iliad and the Odyssey, focusing in particular on past counterfactual constructions. Crosslinguistic studies have shown that such modal constructions reflect the univer…