The evolution of the Ancient Greek deverbal pragmatic markerságe, íthiandphére

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, I look at the Ancient Greek expressionságe, íthiandphére, which are all usually translated as ‘come (on)’. After discussing some existing accounts of these items, I look at their structural – syntactic properties and argue that they can be regarded as pragmaticalized imperatives. Then, I propose a new interpretation of their function – on this analysis, they can be regarded as conversational “boosters”, increasing the degree of strength of the illocutionary point of the utterance. Finally, I look at their diachronic development – in the corpus under consideration,ágeis gradually replaced byíthias the expression used with other imperatives, whilephéredevelops as the preferred expression for use with non-imperative directive utterances.