Subject-Verb Agreement with Coordinated Subjects in Ancient Greek

Mambrini, Francesco; Passarotti, Marco

doi:10.1163/15699846-01601003

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Smyth 1920: 265;Kühner, Raphael & Bernard Gerth 1898: 77-82. 4 On the subject, see now the treebank-based analysis of Mambrini & Passarotti 2016. 5 Mambrini & Passarotti 2012.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank: Linguistic Annotation in a Teaching Environment

Mambrini

2016

Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange &Amp; Public Engagement

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This chapter argues that manual linguistic annotation of Ancient Greek texts can be effectively employed to teach of Greek literature and languages. Under the supervision of a teacher, students can be engaged into the ongoing creation of the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank. With the help of one example from Sophocles (Tr. 962-3), we will illustrate how the collective work of treebanking in a class environment provides an ideal occasion to discuss the methods of Classical Philology and the history of interpretation of a given passage; more importantly, while producing a treebank annotation, students can learn how to read a complex text in its literary and communicative context following the methods of textual criticism. New and old research questions emerge from the work; at the same time, through the final annotation the students will produce a tangible contribution to a crucial initiative that is likely to change the way Greek grammar will be studied in the future.

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“…Smyth 1920: 265;Kühner, Raphael & Bernard Gerth 1898: 77-82. 4 On the subject, see now the treebank-based analysis of Mambrini & Passarotti 2016. 5 Mambrini & Passarotti 2012.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank: Linguistic Annotation in a Teaching Environment

Mambrini

2016

Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange &Amp; Public Engagement

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“…Treebanks such as the ones presented here are a resource for the application of these methods. For example, Greek copular verbs and subject-verb agreement have recently been studied on the basis of annotated dependency data [10,11]. McGillivray and Vatri [12] use treebanks to examine the relationship of acoustic and syntactic information.…”

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Dependency Treebanks of Ancient Greek Prose

Gorman

2020

Journal of Open Humanities Data

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Steps I made the trees using the Arethusa software on the Perseids website [13]. Original text files were obtained from the Perseus Project [14] (Tufts Univ.) and from the Pedalion Project (UK Leuven). I followed the rules of dependency syntax, employing the standard AGDT 1.1 tagset [2] and refining them according to the discussion of dependency syntax offed by Pinkster [15]. I have not used the 2.0 tagset based on Smyth developed by Celano [4]: the level of specificity increases the subjectivity of the annotation decisions exponentially, often relying more on semantics than syntax (what is the difference between a partitive genitive and a genitive of material in the phrase 'piece of pie'?), and the tagset is specific to Greek, making a linguistic comparison between languages more difficult. Sampling strategy While no formal statistical sampling methods were used, I chose to annotate at least 20,000 tokens each from a variety of Greek prose authors. As the size of an average 'book' by many authors, it represents a dataset large enough to use for significant sampling algorithms. I have included works from the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods: Aeschines, Antiphon, Appian, Athenaeus, Demosthenes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Herodotus, Josephus, Lysias, Plutarch, Polybius, Thucydides, and Xenophon. Quality Control The relation labeling follows the general instructions for the AGDT 1.1 tagset given in Bamman and Crane [2]. I have created more detailed instructions for annotating major linguistic phenomena not covered in Bamman and Crane [2] in the 'Treebanking Tips' file within this dataset, relying heavily on the parallel interpretation of dependency syntax offered for Latin by Pinkster [15].

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“…Closest-conjunct agreement with VS and SV (without any intervening element between the subject and the verb) in Plato ..among whom are Hesiod and Archilochus.' (Plato, Ion 532a)Johnson (2013), in a contrastive study of Latin and Greek,Lavidas (2014a), in a study on language change, andMambrini and Passarotti (2016), in a corpus study of Ancient Greek, have also offered valuable data on partial agreement in Classical Greek Mambrini and Passarotti (2016). have shown that closest-conjunct agreement, rather than full agreement, is dominant in Ancient Greek (in the case of conjoined subjects) and that there are very few cases in their Ancient Greek data where the furthest conjunct triggers partial agreement.68 Eumelos.GEN back.NOM.SG broad-PTC shoulder.NOM.DU thérmet' make-hot.IMPF.3SG.MP 'and the breadth of them was hot on the back and on the broad shoulders of Eumelos'(Homer, Iliad 23.380) …”

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“…Mambrini and Passarotti's (2016) data concern all cases of conjoined subjects (and not only examples with verbs in the indicative mood and without any intervening element between the subject, the object and the verb), and, regarding Plato, the data only concern the text of "Euthyphro".…”

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Word order and closest-conjunct agreement in the Greek Septuagint: On the position of a biblical translation in the diachrony of a syntactic correlation

Lavidas

2019

Questions and Answers in Linguistics

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Clauses can show closest-conjunct agreement, where the verb agrees only with one conjunct of a conjoined subject, and not with the full conjoined subject. The aim of this study is to examine the properties of word order and closest-conjunct agreement in the Greek Septuagint to distinguish which of them are due to the native syntax of Koiné Greek, possibly influenced by contact with Hebrew, and which of them are the result of a biblical translation effect. Both VSO and closest-conjunct agreement in the case of postverbal subjects have been considered characteristics of Biblical Hebrew. VSO becomes a neutral word order for Koiné Greek, and Koiné Greek exhibits examples of closest-conjunct agreement as well. The present study shows that VSO is the neutral word order for various types of texts of Koiné Greek (biblical and non-biblical, translations and non-translations) and that closest-conjunct agreement is also present with similar characteristics in pre-Koiné Greek. All relevant characteristics reflect a type of a syntactic change in Greek related to the properties of the T domain, and evidenced not only in translations or Biblical Greek. However, the frequencies of word orders are indeed affected by the source language, and indirect translation effects are evident in the Greek Septuagint.

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Subject-Verb Agreement with Coordinated Subjects in Ancient Greek

Cited by 4 publications

References 11 publications

The Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank: Linguistic Annotation in a Teaching Environment

The Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank: Linguistic Annotation in a Teaching Environment

Dependency Treebanks of Ancient Greek Prose

Word order and closest-conjunct agreement in the Greek Septuagint: On the position of a biblical translation in the diachrony of a syntactic correlation

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