Journal of Greek Linguistics 12 (2012) 205–275 brill.com/jgl Perfect Periphrases in Post-Classical and Early Byzantine Greek: An Ecological-Evolutionary Account* Klaas Bentein Ghent University, Belgium
[email protected] Abstract I analyze the use and development of perfect periphrases with the verbs “be” (εἰμί) and “have” (ἔχω) in Post-classical and Early Byzantine Greek. While their importance has often been stressed in the context of the restructuring of the verbal system (more in particular the loss of the synthetic perfect), they have not received an in-depth, corpus-based treatment yet. The approach adopted in this article builds on insights from recently developed ecological-evolutionary models, which recognize the fact that language change is a two-step process, consisting of innovation and propa- gation, and that multiple ‘ecologogical’ factors inlfuence the spread of a construction through the population (what I discuss in terms of ‘register’). Keywords Ancient Greek; perfect; periphrasis; diachrony; ecology; register 1. Introduction This article discusses the development of the Post-classical and Early Byzantine Greek verbal system, concentrating on the functional domain of perfect aspect.1 *) Parts of this article were presented at the Fifth International Conference of the German Cogni- tive Linguistics Association (Freiburg, October 10–12, 2012). I would like to thank Wolfgang de Melo, Trevor Evans, Mark Janse, Albert Rijksbaron and an anonymous referee of Journal of Greek Lin- guistics for their helpful comments on previous versions of the article (any mistakes or inaccura- cies remain entirely my own responsibility). My work was funded by the Special Research Fund of Ghent University (grant no.