Non-initial adpositions in Pindar

Description

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 to the first accented word of their phrase, in the so-called Wackernagel position). But the reluctance to put them in the last position of the phrase is problematic by that account. A new method of assessing the strength of word breaks in lyric verse shows that non-initial adpositions, while being second in their phrase, still cliticize to their right, as prepositions do.

Abstract

International audience

Additional details