The Prosody of Greek Speech [Hardcover]

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 reliable 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.

A learned, serious and important book...completely original...it contains the answer to many questions which classicists and linguists constantly ask and to which the existing handbooks of metrics and prosody give only tentative answers. --Henry Hoenigswald,University of Pennsylvania, Emeritus

Very well written. A very important book. It displays an incredible breadth of knowledge and understanding. --Sheila Embleton,York University

I enjoyed reading this book more than almost any other in Linguistics or the Classics in the past several years, and it is a spectacular piece of scholarship. [It] should be read by every Classicist even remotely concerned with Ancient Greek as the living entity it once was....The efforts that have culminated in this volume provide a nearly bottomless source of real advances and ideas that should spawn years of fruitful research. --Bryn Mawr Classical Review