Ancient Greek Accentuation

AbstractThe accentuation of many categories of ancient Greek word appears arbitrary, but this book points to some striking correlations between accentuation and a word’s synchronic morphological transparency, and between accentuation and word frequency that give clues to the prehistory of the accent system. 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, the book uses the synchronically observable correlations to bridge the gap between the accentuation patterns reconstructable for Indo-European and those directly attested for Greek from the Hellenistic period onwards. As well as yielding a better understanding of the history of Greek accentuation, this study produces some more general discoveries. The notion that recessive accentuation is the most globally regular — in the terms of some ‘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 relating to a word’s frequency. The study yields new insights into the role of frequency in language change, and into some aspects of Indo-European accentuation.