Recht Tom. Verb-Initial Clauses in Ancient Greek Prose: A Discourse-Pragmatic Study

University of California – Berkeley, 2015. — 148 p.Word order in Ancient Greek, a ‘free word order’ or discourse-configurational language, dependslargely on pragmatic and information-structural factors, but the precise nature of these factors isstill a matter of some controversy (Dik 1995, Matić 2003). In this dissertation, I examine the setof constructions in which a verb appears in first position in its clause, and consider the conditionsunder which such constructions appear and the roles they play in structuring Greek discourse. Idistinguish between topical and focal initial verbs, and show that the former class (which are themain concern of the study) in fact occur as part of larger units definable in terms of both prosodyand pragmatics. The function of such units, I argue, is to mark specific kinds of transitions betweenthe implicit questions that structure discourse (Questions Under Discussion [QUDs], Roberts1996). I describe and categorize the types of QUD transitions marked by verb-initial units in acorpus of five fifth-and fourth-century Greek prose authors, and relate these to transitions markedby other classes of constructions, including a newly identified contrastive-topic construction. Myaccount improves on preceding models by unifying a number of phenomena previously treated asdisparate. It also represents the first large-scale application of the QUD model to real discourse.