The Prosody of Greek Speech [Paperback]

The reconstruction of the prosody of a dead language is, on the face of it, an almost impossible undertaking. However, once a general theory of prosody has been developed from eliable data in living languages, it is possible to exploit texts as sources of answers to questions that would normally be answered in the laboratory. In this work, the authors interpret the evidence of Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on crosslinguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data, and reconstruct the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing, and intonation of classical Greek speech. Sophisticated statistical analyses are employed to support an impressive range of new findings which relate not only to phonetics and phonology, but also to pragmatics and the syntax-phonology interface.

Abbreviations
1. The Physiology of Prosody
2. The Syllable
3. Rhythm
4. Pitch
5. Word Prosody
6. Connected Speech
7. The Appositive Group
8. The Minor Phrase
9. The Major Phrase and Utterance
10. Topic and Focus
Bibliography
Index

A. M. Devineis Professor of Classics, Stanford University.

Laurence D. Stephensis Adjunct Professor of Classics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.