Που in Attic Drama: Evidential Marker and Common Ground Manager

Abstract

In this paper, we offer a detailed analysis of the particle που in Attic drama. We argue that Attic που is a marker of indirect personal evidentiality; it marks, in other words, that the information expressed has been obtained by inference or presumption. Additionally, we hypothesize that που is a pragmatic, intersubjective particle serving to establish or maintain common ground between speaker and addressee. In particular, as a grounding and hedging device, it can convey information with caution, putting speaker and addressee on the same informational level in order not to offend the addressee. In Section 1 we offer a concise statement of our argument and discuss a number of linguistic phenomena relevant to our analysis, most notably evidentiality, common ground, hedging, and grammaticalization (Sections 1.1–1.4). Section 2 outlines our corpus-based methodology and analytical criteria. The body of our paper is devoted to a close linguistic analysis of our corpus (Section 3). Section 4 offers our main conclusions.