Wheeler's Law

EnCyCLoPEdIA of AnCIEnt GrEEK LAnGuAGE And LInGuIStICS Volume 3 P–Z, Index General Editor Georgios K. Giannakis Associate Editors Vit Bubenik Emilio Crespo Chris Golston Alexandra Lianeri Silvia Luraghi Stephanos Matthaios LEIdEn • BoSton 2014 This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV table of Contents Volume one Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... List of Contributors ....................................................................................................................................... table of Contents ordered by thematic Category ............................................................................... transcription, Abbreviations, Bibliography ........................................................................................... List of Illustrations ......................................................................................................................................... Articles A–f ..................................................................................................................................................... vii xi xv xxi xxiii 1 Volume two transcription, Abbreviations, Bibliography ........................................................................................... Articles G–o .................................................................................................................................................... vii 1 Volume three transcription, Abbreviations, Bibliography ........................................................................................... Articles P–Z ...................................................................................................................................................... Index .................................................................................................................................................................. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV vii 1 547 wackernagel’s law ii (v’s) (bṓtōr), and later still to consonants (ennosígaios) in initial and later even non-initial syllables (Akhilleús); but actual evidence for such a chronology has yet to be produced. Bibliography Kuryɫowicz, Jerzy. 1956. L’apophonie en indoeuropéen. Wrocɫaw. Nagy, Gregory. 2008. Greek: an updating of a survey of recent work. Electronic publication in the Hellenic Studies series, Center for Hellenic Studies. Washington, D.C. Schwyzer, Eduard. 1939. Griechische Grammatik. Bände I–III. Munich. Wackernagel, Jacob. 1889. “Das Dehnungsgesetz der griechischen Komposita”, Programm zur Rektoratsfeier der Universität Basel 1889:1–65. Reprinted 1955 in Kleine Schriften II, 897–961. Göttingen. Whitney, William D. 1879. Sanskrit grammar. Leipzig. Wyatt, William F. Jr. 1969. Metrical lengthening in Homer. Rome. Chris Golston Wheeler’s Law ‘Wheeler’s Law’ refers to a phonologically conditioned → accent retraction process reconstructed for an early pandialectal stage of Greek by which oxytone words became paroxytone if they ended in a heavy-light-light → syllable sequence (‘HLL’), e.g. *poikilós > poikílos ‘multicolored’ (HLL), *dedegmenós > dedegménos ‘awaiting, expecting’ (LHLL). Note that wordfinal syllables ending in a short → vowel followed by one → consonant (e.g. -os) count as light for Wheeler’s Law, just as they do for the → ‘law of limitation’. The accent retraction was originally proposed by Benjamin Ide Wheeler (1854–1927) in 1885; for further insights, analysis, and references, see Probert (2006). Evidence for Wheeler’s Law comes especially from the comparison of several Greek suffixes with their Vedic Sanskrit cognates: Gk. -ménos vs. Ved. -ānáḥ forming pf. mid. → participles; Gk. -úlos vs. Ved. -uráḥ or -uláḥ, and Gk. -ílos vs. Ved. -iráḥ or -iláḥ forming → adjectives. There is a strong case to be made that the Greek suffixes were originally oxytone as in Vedic, and that the retraction was phonological. First, → language change typically affects classes of words defined by shared phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic properties, or a combination thereof. Most Greek pf. mid./pass. participles in -menos, and virtually all adjectives in -ulos and -ilos, end HLL, i.e., they have 515 a phonological property in common, whereas the Vedic suffixes do not. Second, a number of the Greek formations of this type that did not meet the HLL condition appear to have escaped the retraction. For example, pakhulôs ‘roughly’ (LLH) presupposes an oxytone adj. *pakhulós ‘rough’ (LLL), which forms a word equation with Vedic bahuláḥ ‘thick, broad’. Additionally, → personal names and appellatives that derive from participles in -menos, e.g. Orkhomenós (HLLL) and dexamenḗ ‘reservoir’ (HLLH), suggest that at an earlier stage of the language, all Greek mid./ pass. participles in -menos, regardless of → tense/ aspect, were oxytone, since there is no known rightward accent shift in the history of Greek by which a putative *Orkhoménos > Orkhomenós (cf. Kiparsky 1967:75). Third, the only accentable segment in the PIE suffix *-mh₁nos (Klingenschmitt 1975:161–163) is the vowel “o”. Assuming the validity of Wheeler’s Law, it was followed by analogical changes that promoted accentual uniformity among related words and grammatical forms. Speakers avoided accent alternation within the → inflectional paradigm, e.g. between the paroxytone masc. nom. sg. *poikílos (HLL), which underwent retraction, and the oxytone masc./neut. dat. sg. *poikilôi (HLH), which did not, by virtually always generalizing the accent of the (masc.) nom. sg. of adjectives and nouns to the remaining forms of the paradigm: poikílos, poikílōi. This may reflect a base-derivative relationship within the inflectional paradigm, where the accent of the other → case forms in the relevant paradigms was derived from the (masc.) nom. sg. This was the view of the ancient grammarians, and this relationship is often assumed for didactic purposes in modern handbooks (cf. Probert 2003:54–60). The result was accentual uniformity within inflectional paradigms. Speakers also preferred for words formed with the same suffix to be uniformly accented. Where Wheeler’s Law produced paroxytone suffix variants such as *dedeg-ménos (LHLL) beside unaffected oxytone variants such as *kekhu-menós ‘having been poured’ (LLLL), *Pelasg-íkos ‘Pelasgian’ (LHLL) beside *orphan-ikós ‘orphaned’ (HLLL), they generalized one of the two variants, perhaps the more frequent one (cf. Probert 2006:93–96): dedeg-ménos, kekhu-ménos; Pelasgikós, orphan-ikós. These analogical changes effectively extended and reversed the results of Wheeler’s Law. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 516 wheeler’s law The accent alternations that arose from Wheeler’s Law are partly preserved in compounds of the type psūkho-pompós ‘soul escorting’, patroktónos ‘father-killing’, where the second member is the head of the compound, has an “active” meaning (e.g. ‘killing’ not ‘killed’), and consists morphologically of a verbal root (→ Root Structure (and Ablaut)), usually with o-vocalism (e.g. pomp not pemp), followed by the theme vowel (→ Thematic Vowel, Stem Formation). In Vedic, this type of compound is oxytone, e.g. hasta-grābháḥ ‘hand-grasping’, bhuvana-cyaváḥ ‘world-shaking’. In Greek, the compounds all end in a light syllable. They are oxytone if the penultimate syllable is heavy, i.e., where the HLL context for retraction did not apply, e.g. psūkhopompós (HLHL). Where it is light, they are paroxytone, both where the HLL context was met, e.g. teukhes-phóros ‘armor-wearing’ (HHLL), and where it was not, e.g. teukho-phóros ‘id.’ (HLLL). We arrive at the attested situation if we assume that speakers began predicting the accentuation of these compounds on the basis of the weight of the penult alone. The phonetic motivation for Wheeler’s Law remains unclear. As an accent retraction process sensitive to → syllable weight patterns, it is akin to → Vendryes’ Law (Attic only) and → Bartoli’s Law (chronology and dialectal distribution disputed). nents of the sentence (lógos; oratio), the term acquired, within technical grammaticography, a morphological-paradigmatic sense, referring to word classes, i.e., types of linguistic forms sharing (a) a basic meaning (“substance”, “action”, “person”, “way of―”, etc.), (b) a formal shape and ‘behavior’ and (c) a set of (morpho-syntactic) uses. The treatment of these ‘parts of speech’ became the core of grammatical description in antiquity, especially since syntax was only occasionally and in a very restricted sense dealt with by ancient grammarians (cf. Schoemann 1862; Charpin 1986). Starting with the Alexandrian grammarians, the ‘parts of speech’ were built into a (sub)model of grammar: this model― referred to in linguistic literature as the ‘Wordand-Paradigm’ (or ‘WP’) model (cf. Hockett 1954; Robins 1957, 1966, 1986) – consists of (a) the listing of the relevant word classes, constituting the (basic) morphological paradigms of the language; (b) their definition in terms of formal and semantic characteristics; (c) an account of these features, especially with reference to ‘extralinguistic’ structures/facts/properties. In what follows, the historical evolution of the system of parts of speech in antiquity will be presented; subsequently, the methodological status and impact of this system will be discussed. 2. History of the Word Class System Bibliography Kiparsky, Paul. 1967. “A propos de l’histoire de l’accentuation grecque”, Langages 2:73–93. Klingenschmitt, Gert. 1975. “Tocharisch und Urindogermanisch”. In: Flexion und Wortildung: Akten der V. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft Regensburg, 9.-14. September 1973, ed. by Helmut Rix, 148–163. Wiesbaden. Probert, Philomen. 2003. A new short guide to the accentuation of Ancient Greek. London. ——. 2006. Ancient Greek accentuation: synchronic patterns, frequency effects, and prehistory. Oxford. Wheeler, Benjamin Ide. 1885. Der griechische Nominalaccent. Strassburg. Dieter Gunkel Word Classes (mérē toû lógou), Ancient Theories of 1. Introduction The expression ‘parts of speech’ is a literal translation of the Greek term mérē toû lógou, which was calqued by Latin authors as partes orationis. While it initially referred to the compo- The historical development of the set of ‘parts of speech’ was sketched, in a number of ‘doxographical’ texts, by ancient authors such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Quintilian and a number of scholiasts (for a full inventory of the texts, and a historiographical meta-analysis, see Wouters & Swiggers 2010 and Swiggers & Wouters 2011a). While these ‘doxographical’ accounts constitute interesting testimonies, they present two main defects: (a) on the one hand, they are based on an inadequate chronological perspective and thus distort the historical lines of development; (b) on the other, they impose an overall ‘rectilinear’ evolution on a century-long process that was not unidirectional, but marked by lateral developments (some of which were successful, others not) and also by constant interference between grammatical and philosophical views. The evolution of the concept of ‘parts of speech’ was one of adaptations, refinements and re-shufflings of an empirically constituted ‘tool box’ for grammatical description (cf. Lallot 1988; Matthaios This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV