Aspect and Actionality in Homeric Greek.

Aspect is presently the focus of much research and debate in linguistics. Findings concerning tense-aspect systems show the need for an approach which is primarily specific-language-oriented, but they also suggest taking into account the role of actionality, examining the way in which it operates on, and interplays with, aspect itself.
Actional parameters have never been systematically investigated in literature dealing with aspect in Ancient Greek. This book is the first step towards filling this gap. Drawing on studies in theoretical linguistics and in typology, it represents a detailed account of both aspect and actionality in Homeric Greek. One of the major aims is to investigate the opposition between present and aorist stems, exploring how actional properties influence the distribution of aspectual markers: in particular, the book provides evidence that telicity, one of the actional parameters analysed, turns out to be relevant to the selection of present and aorist stems. An extensive survey of Homeric data is complemented by discussion of relevant theoretical issues.
The approach followed in this study also makes possible an original contrastive analysis of Homeric Greek and some modern Indo-European languages with different aspectual systems. Against this background, new light is cast on the peculiarities of Homeric aspectual oppositions.
This book will be interesting not only for Indo-Europeanists and historical linguists, but also for researchers working on the semantics of tense and aspect, and for theoretical linguists as well.

Maria Napoli is a Post-Doc research fellow at the University of Pisa. Her interests concern mainly Language Typology and Historical Linguistics. She is the author of several contributions published in national and international journals and volumes.