Search results for "Old Greek"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Introduction
2014
Studying Ancient Greek offers new insights for linguistic theory. Thanks to the amount of available written data of a large corpus at our disposal, it is possible for a linguist to test hypotheses from modern theories in order to explain language phenomena, without disregarding a description according to methodologies adopted in traditional analyses of ancient languages. In particular, the morphological complexity of the Greek verb with its highly intricate inflectional system provide a valuable basis for an in-depth-analysis of the mechanisms which regulate the functioning of a language in the mind of the speaker. Crucially, in recent times also deductive methodologies adopted in the gener…
Root lexical features and inflectional marking of tense in Proto-Indo-European
2009
This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition. The dispute over this issue is well-known; it has been pursued mostly by scholars following various general linguistic approaches, from typology to acquisition, but also by historical linguists and Indo-Europeanists, who have long debated about the precedence of aspect or tense from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. However, so far Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a successful way with re…