Case attraction in Infinitive clauses of ancient Greek: a study on Herodotus, Plato and Xenophon

• Grant number: 17/23334-2
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): March 01, 2018
• Effective date (End): August 25, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Classical Languages
• Cooperation agreement: Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)
• Principal researcher: José Marcos Mariani de Macedo
• Grantee: Caio Borges Aguida Geraldes
• Home Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 19/18473-9 - Ancient Greek Case attraction: infinitive clauses, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

Usually, one justifies the Ancient Greek case attraction as resulting either from the writer's' interest in securing greater textual coherence between nouns in a sentence or from the greater or lesser focus given to an infinitive clause. Yet the case attraction on infinitive constructions has not been commented and explained in a satisfactory way, specially when compared with its version acting on relative pronouns. Acknowledged grammars and syntax handbooks (Goodwin 1881, Kühner e Gerth 1904, Schwyzer 1950, Humbert 1945, Smyth 1956, Cooper e Krüger 1992 e 2002, Rijksbaron 2002) present no formal restrictions to it and leave its occurrence on the author's will. On the other hand, when our preliminary data collection was observed, no attraction was found in Herodotus' text when the phrase had its core on verbs with both personal construction and prefixation. This fact leaves us with a question about how freely attracted and unattracted constructions vary. Having vague and unsatisfactory information on this subject, it is to be proposed a detailed analysis made upon an embracing gathering of data from Herodotus, Plato and Xenophon. The analysis will be made considering parameters of morphology, argumental structure, semantics and discourse organization. Those parameters are to be specified according the intuitions and commentaries from the grammarians and linguists taken into account. For greater guaranties of this analysis' purview, conclusions are to be compared both to those that others have made on the subject (Andrews, 1971, Sevdali, 2013) and on related Ancient Greek phenomena (general attraction, including modal attraction: Napoli 2014; on relative pronouns: Probert 2015, 2016), like relative clauses, as to those made about similar constructions in other languages (as Vedic and other Indic languages Kulikov, 2012; Bantu and its applicative constructions: Bakker 1988; Marten 2000). (AU)