The most immediately obvious difference between Greek and English syntax is free word order, and phrasal discontinuity is the starkest manifestation of free word order. What sort of syntactic typology, one wonders, could license sentences like A red he bought shirt and A shirt he bought red, and what semantic or pragmatic meanings do such word orders convey? The problem of phrasal discontinuity continually confronts the reader of Greek literature, both prose and verse. We need look no further than the first line of the Iliad, the first line of the Odyssey, the first line of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the first sentence of Demosthenes' speech against Aristocrates, the third line of Plato's Phaedrus. More important than its pervasiveness is its theoretical significance: in many ways, phrasal discontinuity is the key to understanding how the whole system of Greek syntax works and how it has evolved over time.
It is only during he past fifteen years that we have acquired sufficient theoretical understanding of language to confront such questions with any degree of confidence. Offering an original new theory to explain the phenomenon, Discontinuous Syntax applies some of these recent ideas in a detailed analysis of phrasal discontinuity as it appears at different stages in the history of ancient Greek. It goes well beyond its immediate topic in leading to a deeper understanding of the basic character of Greek syntax, as well as providing the non-specialist with a handy Greek-oriented introduction to some essential tools of linguistic analysis. Buy Now!
