Wackernagel’s Law in Fifth-Century Greek by David Michael Goldstein A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Andrew Garrett, Co-Chair Professor Donald Mastronarde, Co-Chair Professor Mark Griffith Professor Line Mikkelsen Spring 2010 Abstract Wackernagel’s Law in Fifth-Century Greek by David Michael Goldstein Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Berkeley Professor Andrew Garrett, Co-Chair Professor Donald Mastronarde, Co-Chair This dissertation investigates the distribution of the pronominal clitics and the modal particle ἄν in fifth-century Greek (more specifically in Herodotus, the tragedians, and Aristophanes), which is typically assumed to be governed by Wackernagel’s Law. It argues for a prosody-dominant model of clitic distribution, according to which the position of a clitic is conditioned primarily by prosodic domain, and only secondarily by syntactic domain: clitics typically select for a host at the left edge of an intonational phrase. From here I then pursue the deeper question of what factors are responsible for the mapping of a constituent (or sub-constituent) onto an intonational phrase. I examine preposed phrases, participial phrases, and infinitival clauses, to present a dossier of the pragmatic and semantic meanings that induce intonational-phrase coding, and in turn shape clitic distribution. 1 Acknowledgements There are not many places where one could write a dissertation like this, devoted as it is to both philology and linguistics. I am thus profoundly grateful to my committee for giving me the opportunity to explore this topic. I have enjoyed writing this dissertation more than any other part of graduate school. To my co-chairs, Andrew Garrett and Donald Mastronarde, I owe the largest debt of gratitude. I could not begin to record how much I have learned from them. Their high standards of scholarship have provided me with a model for my own work. They have saved me from countless blunders, in particular those of impetuous youth. Mark Griffith always offered insightful comments, especially on metrics and the language of Greek drama, and provided dearly appreciated encouragement along the way. Line Mikkelsen taught me syntax. Without her instruction, I could not have written this dissertation. Indeed, without her inspiring courses, I probably would not have wanted to. The collective critical acumen that oversaw this project has improved its every page. I could not have hoped for a better committee. I owe a special debt of gratitude also to Mark Hale, whose Indo-European course at the LSA Institute I was able to attend this past summer. He has spent many hours listening to my ideas about Wackernagel’s Law and Indo-European syntax, most of which he disagreed with. But his challenging stance forced me to review my analyses at every step of the way, and they are the stronger for it. Parts of this dissertation were presented at the 2008 Fachtagung of the Indogermanische Gesellschaft, WECIEC 2008, the 2009 LSA meeting, the 2009 Workshop on Indo-European Syntax and Pragmatics at the University of Georgia, and the 2010 APA meeting. I am grateful to comments and discussion from audiences there, in particular Dag Haug, Joshua Katz, Xavier Tremblay, and Andreas Willi. I have learned a lot from discussion with Chris Golston and Brian Agbayani, as well as with Alan Nussbaum and Gary Holland. Carlo DaVia, Boris Maslov, Julia McAnallen, and Simon Shogry all provided me with various kinds of eleventh-hour help. While writing this dissertation, those around me learned more about clitics than they ever wanted to. At Berkeley, Athena Kirk, Joel Rygorsky, and Felipe Rojas provided me with a circle of friendship that I will miss dearly. After ten years in the same place (more or less), it is especially difficult to imagine not going to school with Felipe Rojas anymore. Outside of Berkeley, I am especially grateful to Dieter Gunkel, not only for reading so many chapters, but also for countless phone conversations about IE linguistics over the years. He and Felipe have always made the study of Altphilologie so exciting. Auf München! I dedicate this work to the memory of my brother Eric, who would have wondered why I wrote it. i In Memoriam Eric Marvin Goldstein 31 May 1981 - 23 August 2002 Ú кш Ê 1 . 1 ‘For I do not see what could remove the sorrow drying up my senses, even if I acquired on earth an unrivaled, prosperous kingdom, as well as the power of the gods.’ ii Table of Contents Part I: Foundations 1 Introduction 1 2 Previous Approaches to Wackernagel’s Law 8 3 Prosodic Phonology and the Prosody of Clitics 37 Part II: The Distribution of Clausal Clitics 4 A Prosody-Dominant Model of Clitic Distribution 69 5 The Metrical Data 97 Part III: Discourse and Prosodic Phrasing 6 Preposing I: Strong Topic Constructions 121 7 Preposing II: Strong Focus Constructions 149 8 Clausal Cohesion I: Participial Phrases 172 9 Clausal Cohesion II: Infinitival Clauses 199 10 Conclusions 229 Bibliography 237 iii Suffice it to say, the study of Greek syntax would always have imposed itself on me as a duty, but take away its spiritual, its artistic content, and it would cease to be for me the meadow of asphodel it has been for years. It would lack the purple glow that lights up the arid plain of grammar until it becomes the Elysian fields of art .2 Chapter 1 Introduction Word order in Ancient Greek is often said to be “free,” as the elements of a sentence can be arranged in seemingly any order. In stark contrast to this general freedom, there is a set of lexical items subject to special constraints. These include enclitics (e.g. pronominal clitics) and “postpositives” (e.g. discourse markers such as μέν, δέ, γάρ), whose position in the clause is more restricted, in that they tend to occur second (host- clitic relationships are marked by ‘ ﹦,’ and the relevant clitic is in boldface type): (1.1) κρητῆρές ﹦οἱ ἀριθμὸν ἓξ χρύσεοι ἀνακέαται. ‘Six golden craters have been dedicated by him.’ Hdt. 1.14.6 (1.2) εἰκ﹦ἄν﹦τι γίνητοι τοῖς ἐργώναις τοῖς ἰν τοῖ αὐτοῖ ἔργοι... ‘If anything happens among the workers that are on the same job…’ IG 5.2.6 3 In (1.1) the dative pronoun οἱ falls directly after the first word of the sentence, κρητῆρές. In (1.2), the modal particle ἄν is found in the same position. Here there is actually a further clitic, the form τι, which follows directly thereafter. In cases like this in which multiple clitics stack up in second position, I will describe them all as in second position. 4 The tendency of certain enclitics and postpositives to assume second position within a clause is generally known as Wackernagel’s Law. In 1892, Wackernagel published his seminal monograph on the topic, which would ultimately become the founding document of what we now call Wackernagel’s Law. His observations were based on archaic Indo-European languages (Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, Latin, Gothic, etc.), and 2 Gildersleeve (1903: 5). 3 From Buck (1955: 201). 4 This is a simplifying assumption, which I rely on to avoid the issue of the internal structure of clitic chains. Whether or not this is a valid assumption can only be determined with further investigation into clitic chains. Whatever the results of such a study, I cannot see at this point how they would affect the analysis here. 1 his law is one of the few syntactic generalizations that can be made for archaic Indo- European and the proto-language (see Watkins 1964). Since then similar behavior has been found in many languages throughout the world, such as Luiseño (Uto-Aztecan; Southern California) and Ngiyambaa (Pama-Nyungen; New South Wales, Australia); see Kaisse (1985) for a review. I would like to make three things clear regarding the term and phenomenon known as Wackernagel’s Law. The label Wackernagel’s Law is an honorary designation for a descriptive generalization about the surface position of certain enclitics and postpositives. It is not a “law” in the sense of a prescriptive linguistic convention (as some that I have talked to believe). Despite Wackernagel’s own use of the term Gesetz in the title of his article, he often refers to second-position behavior as a Tendenz . Indeed, Eduard Fraenkel later referred to Wackernagel’s “Law” as a Beobachtung , which in my view is the most accurate description of the accomplishment of the 1892 article. Second, in my view, Wackernagel’s Law as a linguistic “law” has no explanatory power. That is to say, I do not believe that a clitic is ever in second position because of Wackernagel’s Law. For one, there can be and are many “second” positions within a clause for different types of clitics to fall into, as first established by Hale (1987). In Greek, for instance, the pronominal clitic μιν and the discourse marker γάρ can both legitimately be described as “second”-position items, but exhibit considerably different distributional patterns. So it is not fitting to speak of Wackernagel’s Law as though there were only one unified “law” that positioned clitics in one uniform second-position within the clause. But more importantly, Wackernagel’s Law is to my mind only an epiphenomenon that falls out from deeper patterns of organization in the language (Fortson 2009: 3-4 makes this point nicely in reference to metrical laws). In this sense, this dissertation is not about Wackernagel’s Law per se: it is about the underlying factors that give rise to the empirical phenomena assumed to be governed by “Wackernagel’s Law.” 1 The Value of Counterexamples Perhaps the best way to understand the mechanisms behind Wackernagel’s Law is through cases in which it appears to be violated: (1.3) τούτους μὲν δὴ τοὺς βασιλέας ὧδε ﹦ἂν ὀρθῶς κατὰ γλῶσσαν τὴν σφετέρην Ἕλληνες καλέοιεν.