Proper names in Herodotus and Thucydides - Characterization, syntax and semantics

• Grant number: 24/10596-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2024
• End date: July 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Classical Languages
• Principal Investigator: José Marcos Mariani de Macedo
• Grantee: Luís Alberto Goulart Firmino
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project's objective is to make a systematic study on how the different uses of proper names may affect characterization in the works of Herodotus and Thucydides. Proper names have a peculiar semantics, in comparison to common nouns, so that there are restrictions to their use with modifiers. However, there is not yet in Ancient Greek an analysis of which expressions may be understood as syntactically bound to proper names and which, in turn, can only be understood as appositive constructions - that is, constructions that are only semantically and pragmatically associated to the proper name's referent. Nevertheless, any expression accompanying a proper name is not obligatory, but rather is subject to choices by the authors, and so their presence or absence may be associated with characterization in Herodotus and Thucydides' works. Thus, this project proposes to locate, quantify, describe and explain, synchronically, the use of different expressions - i.e. grammatical (e.g. definite article and demonstratives), nominal (e.g. nouns and adjectives in apposition) and phrasal (e.g. attributive participles and appositive relative clauses) - with proper names in order to better understand both the possibilities of syntactic binding or not of proper names and such expressions, and the effects that the use of each of these expressions with proper names have on characterization.