Prepositions and preverbs in Hellenistic Greek

Abstract

This thesis traces the history of usage of a group of words (‘P-words’) that were adverbial particles in Proto-Indo-European and became in Greek, as in many other IE languages, both prepositions and verbal prefixes. It adopts a corpus-linguistic approach which, when allied with a suitable statistical method and a theoretical framework for analysis of syntactic change (grammaticalisation), allows for the detection and sometimes the explanation of trends in usage which may be invisible to a general reader. However, this method relies on the availability of suitably tagged texts for analysis; such tagging exists for the New Testament, the basis of the statistical analyses of this study, and a few other documents of roughly the same period of Greek, but not for large portions of text from other periods. The finding of this paper is that the method is reliable and likely to produce interesting results once diachronic comparisons and same-period genre and register comparisons become possible with the production of standardised grammatical tagging of texts, a program that is being pursued in New Testament studies and has potential for much wider use in Greek linguistics.