Departamento de Filología Clásica

Most commentators on the final verses of Pindar’s Twelfth Pythian Ode have expressed a discontent with the apparent banality they perceived in these lines. Yet there remains a
number of exegetical challenges in regard to the gnomic verses which render their interpretation "eine alte Crux der Erklärung." In this paper we analyze the interpretations that have addressed the final verses, and we state our reasons for rejecting each of them either on syntactical grounds or for their lack of internal coherence. In what follows, we shall propose a new interpretation of the entire passage, one which shows how Pindar is elaborating a *topos* about the role that Time and Deity play in the fulfillment of Fate.

"Our ancient Greek grammars take as a fact the existence of a genitive case marking for the direct object of the verbs expressing the idea of “eat” and “drink”, alternating with the accusative. Such case behaviour is at odds with our observation that in ancient Greek the direct object whose referent is created or altered by the verbal action, is always constructed in accusative case. Our study of such construction shows that the genitive case is in fact very rare: before the first century AD it only appears, with a true partitive meaning, in a reduced set of clearly marked contexts.

Las gramáticas del griego antiguo hablan de un régimen en genitivo para el objeto de los verbos de “comer” y “beber” que aparecería en alternancia con la marca de acusativo. Ello ofrece una dificultad para nuestra observación de que en griego antiguo la marca de acusativo aparece necesariamente cuando el referente del objeto directo es creado por la acción verbal, o resulta modificado por la misma. Nuestro estudio de la construcción de tales verbos muestra que la marca de genitivo es excepcional, y que con anterioridad al s. I d.C. sólo aparece, con un valor claramente partitivo, en contextos muy marcados."

Un estudio lexicográfico del término δράκων (DRAKWN, dragón) en griego desde los primeros testimonios hasta Aristóteles. EL objetivo del estudio es determinar cuál era el referente del término (por oposición a ὄφις, "serpiente") y cuáles sus connotaciones. - A lexicographic study of the word δράκων (DRAKWN, "dragon") in Ancient Greek from the first apparitions to Aristotle. The main aim of this study is to determine the referent and connotations of the term δράκων as opposed to  ὄφις, "snake").

A 1997 report on the state-state-of-the-art of the parsing and syntactic annotation ot the corpus of classical texts (Ancient Greek and Latin) compared with the modern corpora, and a presentation of the author's own syntactic editor, Aristarchus.

Un resumen de las técnicas y bases de datos que existían en 1997 para el análisis y etiquetado sintáctico computerizado de los textos griegos y latinos, con la presentación del editor sintáctico del autor, Aristarchus.

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG: Zunachst werden verschiedene Systeme vorgestellt und diskutiert, die dazu dienen, Texte mit Hilfe des Computers syntaktisch zu analysieren (sog. parsers
und syntactical editors). AnschlieBend werden die wichtigsten Formalismen evaluiert, die bei der Analyse einiger der bedeutendsten englischen Textcorpora (TOSCA, Susanne,
Penn Treebank, u.a.) zum Tragen kommen. Überprüft werden deren Merkmale weiter im Hinblick auf ein grarnmatikalisches tagging der griechischen und lateinischen Literatur. Der Verfasser spricht sich dezidiert dafür aus, für die morphologische Analyse taggers zu entwickeln Iind zu verwenden, für die syntaktische Analyse jedoch syntactical editors. Er diskutiert femer die Notwendigkeit, ein komplexes Markierungssystem zu erstellen, das die Einführung philologischer Kommentare ermoglichen würde. Die Speicherung grarnmatikalischer Informationen muB in jedem Fall scharf von der syntaktischen Darstellung getrennt werden. Das für eine Kornmentierung griechischer und lateinischer Texte zu wahlende System muB von Anfang an so vollstandig wie moglich sein, aber auch weiterhin ausbaufühig .bleiben. Vorgestellt werden letztlich die wichtigsten M.erkmale des Prototyps
für ein solches· System, das der Verfasser selbst entwickelt hat (Aristarchus).

An index to the book "El Complemento directo en Griego antiguo" (Daniel Riaño 2006 Direct Object in Ancient Greek. Madrid:CSIC)

Por razones de espacio, mi libro El Complemento Directo en Griego Antiguo
(2006). Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Manuales
y Anejos de Emérita XLVII [en adelante CDGA], salió a la luz sin los más
que necesarios índices que aquí presentamos. El lector que consulta por primera
vez estos índices, probablemente esté ya familiarizado con tal obra, y
conoce el corpus en el que se basan los datos estadísticos del estudio (descritos
en pp. XXVIII y ss. de CDGA).
Dada la extensión del material, la complejidad del tema y el que pensamos
es un tratamiento en parte al menos novedoso del asunto, tal omisión,
aun involuntaria, hacía que se resintiera la utilidad de la obra para filólogos
y lingüistas, y así nos lo hicieron notar muchos colegas que la habían utilizado.
Este libro tiene por tanto como objetivo proporcionar a los usuarios de
CDGA los índices imprescindibles para poder acudir directamente al lugar
donde se tratan las cuestiones particulares en las que puedan estar interesados.
La mayoría de tales índices se justifican por sí mismos como útil de trabajo
para el lingüista y el filólogo interesado en el estudio de la transitividad
en griego antiguo (índice de los verbos estudiados, de las clases de verbos,
etc.) Los dos últimos índices son de una naturaleza algo distinta: se trata de
un listado de todos los verbos que aparecen en el corpus mencionado, con
especificación del número de apariciones. Por ello, además de su valor a la
hora de conocer el universo del estudio, estas listas tienen una utilidad más
genérica como listas de frecuencia para la prosa narrativa del griego de la
época.
Agradeciéndole ahora a Michael Chase su ayuda en la corrección del
resumen inglés de CDGA creo que corrijo otra importante omisión.
Esperamos que este librito cumpla su objetivo de ayudar en sus investigaciones
a los estudiosos del griego antiguo.

"Presentación de un editor gramatical para la anotación compleja de textos asistida por ordenador (Aristarchus). Fue concebido para el análisis de textos griegos pero puede usarse con cualquier lengua indoeuropea
An editor for grammatical annotation (morphology, syntax and word semantics) of texts  is introduced: Aristarchus. Initially designed for tagging Ancient Greek texts, it can be employed for tagging any Indo-European text."

A review of the first version of Perseus, which came in several CD ROMS. At the time it was necessary even to explain what a CD ROM was. In ten years time, it will be necessary again to explain it to the ordinary teenager. An archaeological artifact from the prehistory of digital humanities.

In this paper I present a new sub-field of study: the linguistic investigation of the messages written in T-Shirts, i.e. its communicative intention, pragmatic issues, problems of decodification, semantic and pragmatic interpretation, etc. (I propose "sartorial messages" or "indumentary inscriptions" to label this kind of messages):
The main purposes of this paper (whose abstract I am publishing here) are threefold:
1. I propose a typology of the indumentary inscriptions (messages written in Tshirts)
2. Describe the importance of the subject and future uses.
3. I offer two examples of its decodification and use during social interrelation, from the cognitive linguistics framework.

Many modern scholars think that the term " histogram " is related to the word " history ". Recent work in the field of the history of statistics has only increased this misunderstanding. The etymology is incorrect for several reasons: first, the word " histogram " does not share a stem with " history " ; second, we show that Karl Pearson, who coined the term, used a clearly defined method to designate recently devised graphs. His method, inspired by Levasseur's work, excludes any relation to the word " history " and confirms the link to the Greek ἱστός (mast). Some clarifications of Pearson's use of the term are given in the paper.

This paper deals with a passage in the seventh book of Aristotle’s Historia An- imalium (602b20-28) usually printed by modern editors as unproblematic from the point of view of the transmission. The author argues that the transmitted text is necessarily corrupt, assess previous attempts to amend it, and points to several ways to find a solu- tion to the textual problem. The paper also weighs the validity of Aristotle’s observa- tions on the behaviour of European catfishes (Silurus glanis and/or Silurus aristotelis). Keywords– Ancient Greek, Textual criticism, Aristotle’s biological works, Historia Animalium, Greek Zoology, Ancient Biology, Ancient Astronomy, Greek science, siluridae, catfishes.

A remarkable property of reciprocal and reflexive pronouns in Ancient Greek seems to have passed hitherto unnoticed: Both types of pronouns tend to receive a secondary (or “less common” or “deviant”) morphological mark under certain conditions, The most statistically frequent “secondary” grammatical marking of such pronounsis the use of a preposition with accusative instead of the simple dative, but other alternations of cases and/or prepositions are possible as well. Although the secondary mark often turns to be the regular mark in later times, such tendency appears to be much greater than the media deviation from the “main” construction from our first documents in prose. To deal with such and similar phenomena, we propose to distinguish between “differential object marking” (following, i.a., Bossong and Aissen) and plain “different marking”, and comment on the relations between both. We explore the possibility that the frequency of the “different” mark in reciprocals and reflexives be related with the decrease of transitivity inherent to the use of reciprocal and reflexive as verbal objects, and the mental imaginery involved in the case marking of some constructions.

At least three DOM-related constructions can be observed in Ancient Greek, but only one of them has received due consideration in the DOM bibliography (Bossong 1998). In this paper I will deal with the other two: the partitive genitive and a borderline instance of alternation in case marking of objects due to aspectual and affectedness variations in the interpretation of the predicate. I will also deal with the relation of the neuter accusative of unspecific objects with DOM, a relatively neglected construction. Central to the relation of Ancient Greek with DOM is the fact that its case marking is both universal and obligatory (or "symmetrical" in two different uses of the term). This explains why in Ancient Greek the functions differentiated by DOM are not Subject and Object, but Object and Extensions to core. Following other authors, I present here some examples of Spanish that show how the "differentiating" function (Comrie 1989) is not enough to explain DOM, even in the classical example of a DOM system, thus making clear the necessity to include constructions as the two mentioned above in a comprehensive definition of DOM.