Abstract

In Herodotus' Histories one finds instances of nominal elements which seem to form cohesive phrases but which are separated from one another by other intervening material. These interrupted phrases are referred to as 'discontinuous' or 'split' constructions. The presence of these discontinuous expressions makes the syntax of Herodotus' Greek seem radically different from that of languages like English. This paper intends to show that although Herodotus' Greek had certain freedoms of syntactic movements which are not overt in languages like English, the dialect in question displays a hierarchy of phrase structure. We will show that Herodotus' DP was richly discourse-oriented and that discourse related factors allowed for freedoms of movement which are not available in languages like English. The goal is to account for split sequences of DPs containing adjectives, quantifiers, demonstratives and WH- words, while at the same time restricting the possibilities of syntactic movements in order to account for constructions which are unattested in the text and are predicted to be ungrammatical by the theory here constructed.