Ancient Greek Accentuation Synchronic Patterns, Frequency Effects, and Prehistory

The accentuation of many categories of ancient Greek word has long been considered arbitrary, but Philomen Probert points to some striking features and argues that they give clues to aspects of the prehistory of the accent system. Focusing on Greek nouns and adjectives with certain suffixes, she finds that in categories with inconsistent accentuation the accentuation is correlated with the synchronic transparency of a word's derivation and the degree to which it is formally and functionally typical of the morphological category in which it originated. Furthermore, accentuation in these categories tends to be related to the frequency of a word's occurrence. Bringing together comparative evidence for the Indo-European accentuation of the relevant categories with recent insights into the effects that loss of transparency and word frequency have on language change, Probert makes use of the correlations that can be observed synchronically to bridge the gap between the accentuation patterns reconstructable for Indo-European and those directly attested for Greek in the Hellenistic and later sources. As well as yielding a better understanding of the history of Greek accentuation in certain categories, this study leads to some more general discoveries. The notion that recessive accentuation is the most globally regular-in the terms of some models 'default'-accentuation for ancient Greek, current in work on Greek phonology, turns out to have implications for the history of the language since the synchronic patterns point to a process by which words originating in non-recessive morphological categories often became recessive after their morphological analysis was lost. Both this loss of analysis and the subsequent change in accentuation are inhibited under certain conditions, some of them relating to a word's frequency. The study yields new insights into the role of frequency in language change, and into aspects of Indo-European accentuation. Book jacket.

Philomen Probert is University Lecturer in Classical Philology and Linguistics, and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.