The Particle γάρ: From Ancient Greek Sentence Connector to Blatant Line Filler? A Case-study on the Late Medieval Greek Chronicle of Morea

Abstract

Ancient Greek is widely regarded as a language with an extraordinary number of so-called “Wackernagel P2 particles” such as γάρ, δ(έ), and μέν, which serve a multitude of discourse functions. From the post-Classical period on, however, these small words gradually lose their importance in discourse and die out. This is reflected in the interest of scholars: while there are many studies on particles in older stages of Greek, not much research has been conducted on the particles in late medieval Greek (LMG; twelfth to fifteenth centuries). At this stage of the Greek language, the P2 particles are acknowledged to no longer be part of the living spoken language. Nonetheless, some of these small words still turn up in texts written in the vernacular. Since most LMG vernacular literature is composed in the metre of the 15-syllabic πολιτικὸς στίχος (vernacular prose being extremely scarce in this period), these occurrences are traditionally explained by appealing to metrical and/or stylistic reasons: the particles constitute archaizing relics merely inserted to give a classicizing flavour to the text, or are even used “metri causa”, simply to achieve the required number of syllables. In this note, I present a case-study on the “explanatory” particle γάρ (“for”) in the Chronicle of Morea, the best-known verse chronicle of the Greek Middle Ages. I show that γάρ is more than a blatant line filler. First, γάρ is not at all distributed at random, but consistently occupies P2 and thus obeys the so-called “Law of Wackernagel”, as the particles in Ancient Greek do. Moreover, γάρ can still exert a clear discourse function, albeit often a different one than in Ancient Greek.