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Part of
Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek
Edited by Camille Denizot and Olga Spevak
[Studies in Language Companion Series 190] 2017
► pp. 137–158

Chapter 7
The right periphery in Ancient Greek

| University of Seville
The paper focuses on the pragmatic functions of elements appearing in the right periphery of the sentence in Ancient Greek. It presents a tentative approach based on a study of Polybius, books 1–5. The second section of the paper centres on the problems related to the concept of right periphery. The syntactic structures which appear in this position are considered in the third section. Section 4 analyses the functions fulfilled by the right periphery elements found in the corpus: (1) they provide clarification of topics; (2) they tend to introduce additional information that is especially salient for the following discourse; (3) in the epitactic pattern, they introduce an additional focus; (4) they have a comment function, expressing the author’s stance.
Keywords: right periphery, Ancient Greek, Polybius, pragmatic function
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The concept of right periphery (RP)
    • 2.1Identification of RPE
  • 3.Analysis of the constructions at the right periphery
    • 3.1Appositions
      • 3.1.1Full apposition and partial apposition
      • 3.1.2Apposition markers
      • 3.1.3Appositions and RPE
    • 3.2Conjunct participles
    • 3.3Absolute participles
    • 3.4Relative clauses
    • 3.5Epitactic constructions
  • 4.Towards an overview of pragmatic functions of the RP
    • 4.1Repair topic function
    • 4.2Introducing additional information
    • 4.3Comment function
    • 4.4Focalising
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.190.07rui
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