Reciprocal constructions in Homeric Greek: A typological and corpus-based approach

Abstract

Abstract Ancient Greek features a wide array of means to encode reciprocity. Even though reference grammars do mention most of these strategies, they have not been brought together and compared in a systematic way so far. In this paper, we provide a thorough corpus-based description of the three most widespread reciprocal markers in Homeric Greek: the pronoun allḗlōn, the middle voice, and the use of preverbs. Our analysis is couched within current descriptive models of reciprocal constructions developed in linguistic typology. As we argue, Homeric Greek offers a remarkably complex picture, whereby these strategies synchronically cover different semantic and syntactic sub-domains of reciprocity, and thus partly stand in complementary distribution. Already in Homer, the pronoun allḗlōn is the most productive marker of reciprocal situations, with the middle voice and preverbs playing a more limited role. By adopting a diachronic perspective, we also show that this distribution can partly be explained as the result of the different historical sources of each construction. Moreover, once properly scrutinized, the facts of Homeric Greek provide interesting cues as to the developments of reciprocal constructions in later stages of Greek.