Leiden University Student Repository

Abswoude, Daphne van (2017)

Focus on each Breath

Master thesis | Classics and Ancient Civilizations (MA)

Current Word Order Analysis in Ancient Greek is not entirely satisfactory as it focuses on describing word order variation only in clauses, whereas in other parts of a sentence consisting of multiple constituents there also appears variation in word order. Because of for example the occurrence of hyperbaton in these parts of the sentence, this variation seems meaningful and can possibly be described in the same terms as the variation in clauses. Therefore, in this thesis, it is proposed to apply the model not only to clauses but also to smaller segments of the text. Just like any other spoken language, the language of the messenger stories in Euripides can be segmented into Intonation Units (IU's). IU's are separated from one another by a pause or other prosodic feature such as pitch. Because of the lack of recorded data, IU-segmentation of ancient texts is in this thesis done by making use of the meter and of the syntactical segmentation criteria suggested by Scheppers (2011).

Word Order

Ancient Greek

Euripides

messenger stories

pragmatics

Intonation Units

Author

Abswoude, Daphne van

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Classics

Supervisors

Rademaker, Adriaan

ECTS Credits

20

Language

en