Reported discourse in Classical Greek : grammatical form and communicative function

• Main Author: Huitink, Luuk
• Published: University of Oxford 2013
• Subjects: 488
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.600632

This study presents a functional approach to the linguistic description of classical Greek reported discourse (RD), as it is used in historiography. forensic oratory and Socratic dialogue. Its main contention is that the definition of RD, its forms, its functions and the distribution of its forms cannot be properly understood without taking into account birth the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts in which reports are produced and interpreted Chapter 1 defines RD in terms of the pragmatic notions intention and perception, and draws up a framework within which the functions and forms of Greek RD can be described and compared in a way which is not possible with purely syntactic or semantic approaches. Chapter 2 examines the main discourse functions of RD. On the basis of the form of the reporting Signal (έλέγε έλέγεϛ έρώ, etc) several more central and peripheral types of RD are distinguished and assigned their main discourse functions. A similar division is made for reported 'thought'. Chapter 3 describes the formal distinctions between direct and indirect discourse (DD, ID), examining to what extent the two can be separated, devoting, amongst other things, attention to 'past-refering' vuv and a version of the de dicto/de re distinction. It also correlates the formal distinctions between DD and ID with functional d distributional differences between the two forms, arguing that DD is not more verbatim than ID, but that DD is an 'involvement strategy'. Chapter 4 examines the functional differences between formally distinct types of indirect statements, treating in turn past ότί/ώϛ-c1auses with the indicative and oblique optative, the complementizers ότί and ώϛ, the participle, and the infinitive. It is shown that a preference for one type or another is not only tied to the semantics of the matrix predicate, but also determined by the contexts in which ID is used.