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The Postponement of Interrogatives in Attic Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

George Thomson
George Thomson
Affiliation:
Birmingham
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Extract

As Headlam remarked more than thirty years ago, ‘It is a strange fact that the order of words in a Greek sentence has never been clearly appreciated.’ The emphatic word is placed at the beginning of the sentence, or as near it as the structure of the language permits. That is the general law, which I have discussed at length in my edition of the Oresteia. My object in this article is to make an exhaustive study of its operation in a limited field.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 33 , Issue 3-4 , October 1939 , pp. 147 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1939

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References

page 147 note 1 ii. 17–19, 367–72: see also my article on ‘The Order of Words in Plato and St. Matthew’ in The Link, no. 2.

page 149 note 1 I ignore my readings at Cho. 378 and Eum. 218, since they are not generally accepted.

page 152 note 1 The terms flexible and fixed are, of course, used relatively in this connexion: the English word-order is not absolutely fixed, and there is evidence of some degree of flexibility in the pitch-accent of ancient Greek: see Meillet, A., L'Étude comparative des langues indo-européennes, 371Google Scholar.