Discourse Pragmatics and Prosodic Reconstruction

Discourse Pragmatics and Prosodic Reconstruction triangulates insights from historical-comparative, Greek, and general linguistics. In Chapter 1 the book proposes a new theoretical framework for the analysis of prosody in ancient texts, which allots a central role to pragmatics in linguistic formulation, and to prosody in linguistic encoding. Unlike in generative approaches, prosody is seen as the primary expression format of linguistic thought, (morpho)syntax representing but a secondary derivative arising from the constant interaction of pragmatics and prosody over time. Chapter 2 describes the role of prosody in language evolution and development in more detail. Chapter 3 reviews existing approaches to prosodic structure (most notably the so-called prosodic hierarchy) and proposes a new model that respects both the cognitive-physiological conditions of language as speech and recent insights into the prosodic typology of modern languages. On the basis of that model as well as a thorough literature review, chapter 4 presents an up-to-date prosodic profile of Ancient Greek. Chapter 5 reviews existing methods and sources for prosodic reconstruction. Chapter 6 describes a new, discourse-pragmatic method that allows for the systematic analysis also of prose texts. Chapter 7 summarizes the central results of the application of that method to a substantial stretch of Herodotus' Histories, namely the Croesus logos corpus (11,734 words; Hdt. 1.6-94).
The monograph represents the first companion to prosodic reconstruction, which is of interest to historical and historical-comparative linguists of different persuasions. Hellenists will find it a sequel of sorts to Devine and Stephens' The Prosody of Greek Speech. Due to its discourse-pragmatic approach, the book not only presents a richer picture of Ancient Greek prosody on the intonational and prosodic phrase levels, but also contributes to a deeper understanding of the composition and effects of the transmitted texts. General linguists, typologists and phonologists will appreciate the fresh look at general questions of language architecture and evolution suggested by the ancient data.
The e-book version will be accompanied by keys to the Greek material.