Postclassical Greek: Contemporary Approaches to Philology and Linguistics ed. by Dariya Rafiyenko and Ilja A. Seržant

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postclassical Greek: Contemporary Approaches to Philology and Linguistics ed. by Dariya Rafiyenko and Ilja A. Seržant William A. Ross dariya rafiyenko and ilja a. seržant (eds.), Postclassical Greek: Contemporary Approaches to Philology and Linguistics (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 335; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020). Pp. viii + 339. $114.99. This volume brings together a slate of scholars to examine linguistic aspects of postclassical Greek, including the biblical corpus, in an interdisciplinary context. It begins with an essay by the editors Dariya Rafiyenko and Ilja A. Seržant that offers an overview of postclassical Greek itself, which they define as "the entire set of spoken and written varieties of the period from 323 BC up to 1453 AD" (p. 1). Their essay briefly surveys issues of periodization and grammar, with an emphasis on the importance of variation in linguistic description, for which reason Rafiyenko and Seržant join others—rightly so in my opinion—in questioning the separation of linguistics from philology that has prevailed throughout much of the last century. They advocate instead what they call the "rephilologization of historical linguistics" (p. 12). The volume is divided into two sections. The first is "Grammatical Categories," which begins with "Purpose and Result Clauses: ἵνα-hína and ὥστε-hṓste in the Greek Documentary Papyri of the Roman Period," by Giuseppina di Bartolo, who surveys the disappearance of certain semantic distinctions in different moods and a reduction of conjunctions to introduce purpose and result clauses. In "Syntactic Factors in the Greek Genitive-Dative Syncretism: The Contribution of New Testament Greek," Chiara Gianollo considers postnominal genitives in the NT, which allowed for the propagation of an external possession construction. Then, in "Future Periphrases in John Malalas," Daniel Kölligan looks at the earliest Byzantine world chronicler, in whose work certain novel, but not idiosyncratic, expressions of future reference appear alongside older patterns. The next essay is "Combining Linguistics, Paleography and Papyrology: The Use of eis, pros and epí in Greek Papyri," by Joanne Stolk, who contrasts these prepositions with the bare dative in expressions of animate goal of motion and transfer verbs, providing new interpretations for uses otherwise considered exceptional. In "Future Forms in Postclassical Greek: Some Remarks on the Septuagint and the New Testament," Liana Tronci examines diachronic morphology to mark future tense, taking external factors such as register variation within the biblical corpus into account. The next essay, by Brian D. Joseph, is entitled "Greek Infinitive-Retreat versus Grammaticalization: An Assessment"; he argues that the morphosyntactic changes in infinitive use represent degrammaticalization and thus that grammatical change is not always unidirectional. The last essay in the first section of this volume is "Postclassical Greek and Treebanks for a Diachronic Analysis," by Nikolaos Lavidas and Dag Trygve Truslew Haug. They employ diachronic analysis to examine syntactic phenomena such as backward control and thus build a linguistic profile of earlier texts. The second section in this volume includes topics related to sociolinguistic aspects and variation in postclassical Greek. The first essay, by Marina Benedetti, is "The Perfect [End Page 538] Paradigm in Theodosius' Κανόνες: Diathetically Indifferent and Diathetically Non-Indifferent Forms," in which she examines the discussion of the perfect in a fourth-century c.e. grammatical treatise. Next, in "Forms of the Directive Speech Act: Evidence from Early Ptolemaic Papyri," Carla Bruno considers strategies available for inducing others to action, including performative utterances and indirect implicatures, among other possibilities. The next essay is one of the longest in the book: "What's in a (personal) Name? Morphology and Identity in Jewish Greek Literature in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods," by Robert Crellin. He challenges the notion that non-nativized morphology of Hebrew personal names implies low-level Greek, arguing instead that sociolinguistic and literary considerations are at work in the decision to adapt personal names or not. The next essay is "Confusion of Mood or Phoneme? The Impact of L1 Phonology on Verb Semantics," by Sonja Dahlgren and Martti Leiwo, who question whether the extensive nonstandard vowel use in Egyptian Greek texts is evidence of poor command of Greek. They suggest instead that such spellings represent underdifferentiated Greek phonemes and transfer elements from non-Greek prosodic systems. The last...