Category Archives: Dissertations / Theses / Dissertation Ideas

I occasionally comment on recent dissertations or propose topics that I think would be good ideas for a dissertation applying Linguistics to Hellenistic Greek. You can find these posts under this category.

New Dissertation on Koine Word Order

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In November Allison Kirk (Leiden University) completed a doctoral thesis with the title, Word order and information structure in New Testament Greek.

I have added her dissertation to the bibliography here at Greek-Language.com. With the entry I included a slightly shortened version of the abstract that appears in the entry for the dissertation at the Leiden Repository. Here’s the shortened abstract:

The dissertation examines word order variation in the Koine Greek of the New Testament in declarative clauses, questions and relative clauses. Kirk examines the way word order corresponds to information structure. She argues that although New Testament Greek shows a variety of possible permutations of the sentence elements subject (S), verb (V) and object (O), in declarative clauses, questions and relative clauses; the word order is not free. Rather, it is partly governed by phrase structure and partly by information structural considerations such as Topic and Focus. The basic word order is described as VSO with an SVO alternative. Marked clauses, such as SOV, OVS, OSV, and some SVO clauses, involve topicalization or focus movement of the arguments.

You can download the entire text from the Leiden Repository.

Two new items for the bibliography

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I’ve added the following two works by Christina Sevdali to my Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics. Both address Classical Greek, but I have been unable to find similar works addressing the Hellenistic period. If you know of works that use a similar method to address control and infinitival constructions in the Hellenistic period, I would love to hear about them.

Sevdali, Christina. ‘Control into CPs: when finiteness does not matter’. In C. Halpert, J. Hartman and D. Hill (eds.) Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop in Greek syntax and semantics at MIT. MIT Working Papers in linguistics 57 (2009), 251 – 266.

Sevdali, Christina. ‘‘Infinitival clauses in Ancient Greek: overt and null subjects, the role of Case and Focus’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, supervised by Professor Ian Roberts, 2007.

If you are interested in following Dr. Sevdali’s work, you can find more information here: University of Ulster – Linguistics Research.

Shain, Rachel M., The Preverb Eis- and Koine Greek Aktionsart (Again)

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Over a year ago I mentioned Rachel M. Shain’s thesis on the preverb εἰς, but I did not at that time mention that it can be downloaded for free. To get a copy, go to the OhioLINK ETD Center. Thanks to Mike Aubrey (ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ) for pointing out this link back in 2010. I’m not sure why I didn’t include it at that time.

For my earlier comment about adding this thesis to the Special Topics page at Greek-Language.com, click here.

Recent Posts on Clitic Placement in Other Blogs

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I would like to recommend Stephen Carlson’s recent discussion of clitic placement over at Hypotyposeis. He has posted four discussions of key implications of David Goldstein’s dissertation.

A little over a year ago, Mike Aubrey had a good bit to say about clitic placement in the New Testament that is also very worthwhile reading (ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ). If you want a refresher on the data, take a look at these posts in particular:

I would like to thank both Mike and Stephen for the work they have dedicated to this topic.

Dissertation Idea? Case and Infinitival Clauses

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I’ve been reading Christina Sevdali’s 2007 dissertation, Infinitival Clauses in Ancient Greek: Overt and Null Subjects, the Role of Case and Focus. She deals primarily with Classical Greek, but delves into some Modern Greek data as well, but she does not deal with the hellenistic period. Her work, though, does raise some questions that should be answered for the hellenistic literature.

Sevdali concludes that both agreement and focus play a role in Case marking in Ancient Greek. Here is part of a long paragraph from pages 209—210 in her last chapter that I think could suggest a dissertation idea for someone working specifically on Hellenistic Greek:

There are various languages [in which] Case can be related to discourse phenomena: Blake, 2001 for example reports Australian languages Nyigina and Gooniyandi where this is true. These languages do not show Case concord within a noun phrase, where Case and number and person are marked on every constituent, i.e. the determiner, the noun, the adjective etc., but Case mark only one constituent, the final one, or the head etc. In some cases, they mark the one that is focalised, essentially using Case as a discourse marker. Miyagawa, 2005 argued that languages can either be agreement prominent (like most Indo-European ones) or focus-prominent (like Japanese), implying that Agreement and Focus are the two sides of the same coin. Assuming that Case exists in both types of languages, it is not unreasonable to assume that it can be linked to Agreement and Focus respectively. On top of that nothing prevents us from arguing that there also exist mixed language types. We want to suggest that AG is a mixed language, being agreement prominent in finite clauses, where Case is linked to agreement, and being focus-prominent in non-finite clauses, where Case is linked to focus as we showed.

Okay… Here are dissertation ideas for the hellenistic period: Can recognizing two different ways in which Case may be assigned (Agreement vs Focus) lead to a clearer understanding of morphological Case assignment in Hellenistic Greek? Under what specific circumstances might morphological Case be controlled by Focus in Hellenistic Greek? Does Focus play any role in the Case assignment of optional arguments of a verb? Does it control the Case assignment of any DPs governed by a preposition, especially prepositions whose object DP is not always assigned the same Case. Prepositions played a larger role in the hellenistic koine than they did in the classical period. How does this affect the agreement/focus split if at all?

Any takers? I’d love to see a dissertation addressing any of these issues.

Rutger Allan: The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek: A Study of Polysemy

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Thanks to Mike Aubrey for making me aware of the free download of Rutger J. Allan’s dissertation on the Middle Voice in Ancient Greek. You can download the whole dissertation or individual chapters here.

While Dr. Allan was dealing with Homeric and Classical Greek, many of his observations and conclusions appear to be very applicable to the hellenistic period as well.

I have added the published version as well as the dissertation to my online bibliography.

Infinitival Clauses

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Have any of you seen Christina Sevdali’s dissertation, Infinitival Clauses in Ancient Greek: Overt and null subjects, the role of Case and Focus? I have not added it to my bibliography because I don’t know if it addresses any texts from the Hellenistic Period. According to the abstract, the last chapter addresses an issue in Modern Greek, but it is not clear whether “Ancient Greek” includes the Hellenistic Period in Sevdali’s work.

Mark Janse on Hellenistic Greek

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I have added eight works by Mark Janse to my Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics. (Thanks to Mike Aubrey for providing the bibliographic information on six of them and a lead to the seventh.)

Dr. Janse is Research Professor in Asia Minor and Ancient Greek at Ghent University. He has written extensively about the history of Greek and related issues in Linguistics. The publications that I have added to the bibliography are ones that consciously apply a specific insight from Linguistics to the study of Greek from the Hellenistic period, or in one case from the Classical period where no similar work has yet been published for Hellinistic Greek.

Here are the items I added:

Janse, Mark. “Aspects of Bilingualism in the History of the Greek Language.” In: J.N. Adams, Mark Janse & Simon Swain (eds.), Bilingualism in Ancient Society. Language Contact and the Written Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 332-390.

________. “The Distribution of the Enclitic Personal Pronouns in New Tetament Greek in the Light of the Septuagint and the Modern Greek Dialects of Asia Minor: A Structural-Functional Analysis.” PhD. dissertation: Ghent University, Department of Latin and Greek.

This dissertation is available from Dissertations Abstracts International 58 (1997) 776-C. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International.

________. “La phrase segmentée en grec ancien. Le témoignage des enclitiques.” Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 86.1 (1991) XIV-XVI. Paris: Klinck sieck.

________. “La position des pronoms presonnels enclitiques en grec neo-testamentaire a la lumiere des dialectes neo-helleniques. In C. Brixhe ed. La koine grecque antique I (1993), 83-121. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy.

________. “Phonological Aspects of Clisis in Ancient and Modern Greek.” Glotta 73 (1995-1996) 155-167. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

________. “The Prosodic Basis of Wackernagel’s Law.” In André Crochetière, Jean-Claude Boulanger & Conrad Ouellon (eds.), Les langues menacées. Actes du XVe Congrès international des linguistes, Québec, Université Laval, 9-14 août 1992. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1993, Vol. 4, 19-22.

Originally presented as a paper at the 15th International Congress of Linguists, Quebec, August 9 to 14, 1992.

Creve, Sam, Mark Janse, and Kristoffel Demoen, “The Pauline Key Words πνεῦμα and σάρξ and their Translation.” Filología Neotestamentaria. Vol. 20 (2007), 15-31.

Mike Aubrey has himself done a good amount of work on Hellenistic Greek Clitics and reached similar conclusions. He has posted several discussions at ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ.

Dissertation: Infinitival Clauses in Ancient Greek

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Here’s another dissertation with clear application of a specific brand of Linguistics to Ancient Greek. Reading it requires some knowledge of generative linguistic theory.

Sevdali, Christina. “Infinitival Clauses in Ancient Greek: Overt and null subjects, the role of Case and Focus.” Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University , Department of Linguistics, 2007.

You can read the abstract here.