Από τη σημασιολογία της ελληνικής γλώσσας. Όψεις της 'επιστημικής τροπικότητας' [Greek semantics. Aspects of 'epistemic modality']

VELOUDIS SHMASIOLOGIA

G. Veloudis

ISBN 978-960-231-137-0

Edition: 2010

Pages: 440

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This volume brings together older and more recent texts by G. Veloudis. From the very beginning, these texts aimed to investigate aspects of human subjectivity – at least, those aspects that a pair of linguistic tongs can retrieve and whatever skillfulness its user might have can develop. Bearing this last – and graver – reservation in mind, this collection invites us to embark on a difficult endeavor, its point of departure being the expansion of the notion of subjectivity in its most typical linguistic field, that of epistemic modality, and its finish line a first attempt at producing a ‘visualization’ of its typical aspects.

The author’s interest, though, lies in the journey, in the in-between destinations of a more and more borderline quest for subjectivity: in the subjunctive and in negation; in the so-called ‘paradoxical’ για να; in the grammatical category ‘perfect’; in the pronoun που and the possessive genitive, familiar to us from school syntax textbooks; in the concessive conjunctions, from πάντως and μολονότι to αλλά and όμως; and finally, in the daring thought of metonymically correlating the future tense of the language with the future of the community in Kavafis’ poem ‘Waiting for the barbarians’. The journey’s fatigue is alleviated by answers to individual questions-riddles of Greek semantics: for instance, why has να been selected as an index of the subjunctive? What is the difference between μη φύγεις and να μη φύγεις? What connects κανένας to κάποιος? How is the use of the utterance Είναι πολύ έξυπνος για να τον γελάσεις explained? What is the relationship between the genitive absolute of Ancient Greek and today’s perfect tense? It is accidental that the ‘auxiliary’ έχω is used for the analytic construction of this category of the verb? Why have ίσως and όμως come to denote conditionality and contrast respectively despite their common semantic origin, ‘equally’, ‘likewise’?

G. Veloudis is professor of Linguistics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Full title Από τη σημασιολογία της ελληνικής γλώσσας. Όψεις της 'επιστημικής τροπικότητας' [Greek semantics. Aspects of 'epistemic modality']
Author G. Veloudis
Editing / Translation  
Edition 2010
ISBN 978-960-231-137-0
Series
Pages 440
Size 17x24
Weight 0,757
Binding Paperback
Sample