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Perfects in Indo-European Languages and Beyond
Edited by Robert Crellin and Thomas Jügel
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 352] 2020
► pp. 435–482

Chapter 13
The perfect system in Ancient Greek

| University of Cambridge
The present paper surveys the diachronic development of the Ancient Greek perfect in four periods: Mycenaean, Archaic, Classical and post-Classical. At each stage the semantic evaluation of perfect is assessed in the context of the semantics of its predicate. While generally confirming the standard picture of increasing anteriority and past reference in the perfect correlating with greater numbers of verbs able to form perfects, the present study contributes empirical data to support this assertion. The article traces the growing paradigmatisation of the perfect form throughout its history. However, this development is not linear. Instead in the post-Classical language we witness a bifurcation along diglossic lines, with the literary language remaining much more conservative in terms of the perfect’s semantic range, while in lower-register material the perfect increasingly competes with the aorist to denote perfective semantics.
Keywords: perfect, anterior, event and argument structure, lexical aspect, resultative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Morphology
    • 1.2Periodisation
    • 1.3The problem of the semantics of the Greek perfect
  • 2.Theoretical preliminaries
    • 2.1Homogeneity, state and change-of-state
    • 2.2Target (T) and Result (R) states
    • 2.3Internal and external arguments
  • 3.Mycenaean
  • 4.Archaic Greek
    • 4.1State and other homogeneous predicates
    • 4.2Change-of-state predicates (non-causative)
    • 4.3Causative COS predicates
    • 4.4Two-place verbs introducing non-homogeneous non-COS predicates
    • 4.5Semantics of the perfect in Archaic Greek
  • 5.Classical
    • 5.1Continuity with Archaic Greek
    • 5.2Paradigmatisation: Expansion of the active ~ non-active opposition in the perfect
    • 5.3Specialised transitivising and detransitivising perfect active stems
    • 5.4Lability in the perfect system
    • 5.5Felicity conditions
    • 5.6Summary of the semantics of the perfect in Classical Greek
  • 6.Post-Classical Greek
    • 6.1Overview
    • 6.2Literary language: Distributional trends with respect to earlier periods
    • 6.3Semantic continuity with earlier periods
      • 6.3.1Further paradigmatisation: COS predicates
      • 6.3.2Bounded homogeneous atelic predicates
    • 6.4Documentary texts
      • 6.4.1Continuity with earlier stages and the literary language
      • 6.4.2Paradigm loss: expression of the anticausative by non-active morphology
      • 6.4.3Competition with the aorist: Definite past time adverbial modification and use of the perfect in past narrative
    • 6.5Semantics of the perfect in post-Classical Greek
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 23 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.352.13cre
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