BERTRAND , Nicolas

À partir de la constatation que les formes intransitives du verbe ἵστημι (en particulier στῆ et ἔστη) sont beaucoup plus souvent localisées au début de vers que ce qu'on pouvait prévoir en vertu de leur forme métrique abstraite, cet article cherche à montrer que cette surlocalisation est liée à un emploi particulier de ces formes verbales en...

Runover adjectives are found to be a means by which the Homeric poet introduces a description in the course of the narrative.

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In ancient Greek, relative pronouns are, as a rule, subject to wh-movement and obligatorily surface at the left edge of the relative clause. However, the archaic poet Pindar sometimes allows material belonging to the relative clause to appear in front of the relative pronoun, which is then postponed within its clause. In this paper, I survey...

In this paper I study the uses of the runover adjective καλός, which is a means for the Homeric narrator to introduce many descriptions. I show that this use is not part of a formulaic system but indicates through traditional referentiality the special status of the object described. That object is frequently a symbol (σῆμα) of its owner or has...

Adpositions in Ancient Greek prose come first in the adpositional phrase. However, in verse, they can surface further right in their phrase.A careful examination of those non-initial adpositions proves that their position is not a result of syntactic movement. Rather, they inherited the ability to be treated as postpositive words (cliticizing...

The aim of this talk is to present preliminary results of our investigation into the prosodic, syntactic and information-structural properties of those combinations of Narrow Focus and Verb in Homeric Greek where the Narrow Focus is placed at the end of one verse while the Verb follows at the beginning of the next, cf. (1). These instances...

This article explores the problem of information structure in ancient Greek direct constituent questions from the perspective of wh-placement. It begins with the observation that wh-items are intrinsically focused and that typologically, wh-placement is predictable based on the focusing properties in some languages, such as Indonesian (in situ...

It is now firmly established that the word order in Ancient Greek (AG) expresses information structure (Bertrand 2010; Dik 1995; Matić 2003). Specifically, two focus positions have been identified in declarative clauses: one immediately before the verb (1), and one at the end of the clause, when the communicative context licences a narrow...