From Athenian fleet to prophetic eschatology. Correlating formal features to themes of discourse in Ancient Greek

Abstract

This is a diachronic corpus-based semantic analysis of the verb plēróō in Ancient Greek, from 6th c. BCE to the 2nd c. ce. Adopting the usage-based profile approach, it inquiries into the relation between formal features and themes of discourse, following the methodological consequences of two theoretical assumptions: first, that textual themes have a prototypical structure. Second, that formal features as a conceptual schematicity underlying the elaborated and situated level of discourse are immanent to these themes. Methodologically, it implements a Multiple Correspondence Analysis for each century, exploring the contribution of the formal and a fine-grained range of semantic features to the variation, as well as the strength of association between them. In order to test the plausibility of the immanence hypothesis, the analysis implements a Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering for the totality of data over the eight-century period, comparing the results of the latter with the individual MCA analyses.