Semantics and pragmatics of ancient Greek case attraction

• Grant number: 21/06027-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2021
• End date: September 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Classical Languages
• Principal Investigator: José Marcos Mariani de Macedo
• Grantee: Caio Borges Aguida Geraldes
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In order to verify the results and hypotheses raised in previous researches, this project aims to compile data for constructions of infinitive complementation in Ancient Greek at which a secondary predicate inside the infinitive clause refers to an oblique constituent (in genitive or dative) of the matrix clause, and assess which factors - syntactic, semantic or pragmatic - favor the agreement between these constituents, a phenomenon called case attraction. The corpus includes the major Attic verse and prose writers. The database will be compile with use of computational techniques of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in order to ease the manipulation of this vast corpus and to assure the reproducibility of any result obtained. The data will be annotated so as to comprehend morpho-syntactic factors (word order and distance, verbal classes, case and tense/aspect), as previously done, and to comprehend semantic and pragmatic factors, above all information about focalization and topicalization of constituents. The main hypothesis to be tested is if secondary predicates which carry particularly relevant for the discursive context are more likely to display long-distance agreement/attraction, and, if so, if different types of pragmatic functions are distinctly related to the frequency of attraction. (AU)