Zukoff Sam. The phonology of verbal reduplication in Ancient Greek

University of Georgia, 2014. — 188 p.This thesis sets out to develop a constraint grammar for Ancient Greek within the framework of Optimality Theory that can economically and thoroughly account for the diversity of forms and patterns within the reduplicated categories of the verbal system. Analyzing the reduplicative morphemes to have a morphologically fixed vowel, I propose a constraint ranking that unites the patterns and ascribes the variation to differences in syllabification and alignment considerations. The exceptional patterns of the reduplicated presents and the enigmatic Attic Reduplication are explained as lexicalized archaisms generated by a minimally different constraint grammar of an earlier period of the language. This thesis thus seeks to integrate cutting-edge theoretical techniques with traditional historical methods to create a fully integrated account of reduplication in Ancient Greek, such that the conclusions drawn here may yield new insights not only into the synchronic state of Ancient Greek but also on the nature of reduplication in Proto-Indo-European.