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Polarizing the future-the development of an aspectual opposition in the Greek future tense
... 85 Mandilaras (1973), for example, refers to declarative infinitives as 'ὅτι-infinitives' and to dynamic infinitives as 'ἵνα-infinitives'. 86 See most recently Lucas (2012). ...
Several reasons have been proposed for the decline of infinitival complementation in Ancient Greek: the fact that the infinitive became morphologically restricted, the inherent redundancy of the Classical complementation system, and language contact. In this article, I explore yet another reason for the decline of the infinitive: I argue that the system of infinitival complementation became fundamentally ambiguous in its expression in later Greek. As has been noted previously, the loss of the future and perfect tense had a serious impact on the use of infinitival complementation. However, rather than there being an ‘omission’ of temporal distinctions, as previous studies have claimed, I argue that the present and aorist infinitive became polyfunctional, being used for anterior, simultaneous, and posterior events. Next to temporal ambiguity, a second type of ambiguity occurred: ‘modal’ ambiguity or ambiguity with regard to the speech function of the complement clause. Already in Classical times, the present and aorist infinitive could be used after certain verb classes to encode both ‘propositions’ and ‘proposals’ (offers/commands), an ambiguity which continues to be found in later Greek. The study is based on a corpus of documentary texts from the Roman and Byzantine periods (I – VIII AD).
It seems established that infinitives used in declarative infinitive clauses (DeclarInfCl) convey relative temporality in Classical Greek, with the aorist infinitive referring to anteriority, the present infinitive to simultaneity, and the future infinitive to posteriority. In Hellenistic/Roman Greek and in Early Byzantine Greek, by comparison, DeclarInfCl do not display the same variety of infinitive forms. These periods appear to avoid the aorist infinitive while manifesting a very common use of perfect infinitives and stative present infinitives in DeclarInfCl. These tendencies stand in a complex relation to other developments in the post-Classical period. This paper accounts for what appears to be the decline of the aorist infinitive in DeclarInfCl, claiming that this phenomenon is most likely related to the perfect infinitive adopting the function of conveying anteriority in DeclarInfCl.
Medieval Greek had three future periphrases making use of a finite verb and an infinitive: μέλλω + INF, ἔχω + INF, θέλω + INF. Given the parallel nature of the periphrases as well as the fact that the infinitive existed in both a perfective and an imperfective version, it might be expected that these future-referring forms developed aspectual distinctions in similar ways. However based on papyrological evidence from AD I and AD VI this article shows that this was not the case. Rather, each future periphrasis seems to follow its own path towards the aspectual distinction which is a hallmark of the Modern Greek verbal system: μέλλω + INF has a much higher ratio of imperfective infinitives than the two other periphrases especially in AD I, ἔχω + INF starts out using only the perfective infinitive when referring to the future, and θέλω + INF distinguishes for aspect before it gains future meaning. The difference in aspectual usage is explained both by the semantics of the respective auxiliaries and by different oppositional relations (modal and temporal) that the periphrases enter into.
This book investigates the development of three future-referring constructions in Greek, namely "μ ε λ λ ω / oe Χ ω / θ ε λ ω + Infinitive / complement clause" in the classical (5th-4th c. BC), the Hellenistic-Roman (3rd c. BC-4th c. AD), the Early Medieval (5th-10th c. AD), and the Late Medieval period (11th-15th c. AD). Despite their co-occurrence in all these periods, it is shown for the first time that these constructions were increasingly differentiated in terms of their semantic, syntactic, and sociolinguistic properties. The analysis sheds new light on these developments, since large parts are based on hitherto unknown material, drawn especially from papyri and non-literary documents. The investigation is based on the functional-typological perspective of grammaticalization, and it pays particular attention to a variety of-often neglected-factors, such as language contact. The typological predictions concerning future-referring forms are found lacking in some respects, and various modifications are proposed accordingly.