The Grottaferrata manuscript of Digenis Akritis may be of more interest to Medieval Greek linguists than previously assumed. This rather 'archaizing' version obeys the same medieval distribution rules for object clitic pronouns postulated by Mackridge for the more 'vernacular' Escorial version. Moreover, it is shown that the medieval rules-divided into a syntactic and a pragmatic principle-clearly constitute a gradual continuation of older, post-Classical, tendencies. Much attention is paid to the pragmatic principle in relation to verbs, which is invoked as an explanatory principle for apparent exceptions. * I would like to thank Mark Janse, Peter Mackridge and two anonymous referees of BMGS for their valuable and inspiring comments. My work was funded by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (grant no. B/10040/02). 1 S. Alexiou, BaoiXewq Aiyevijg AKpirrig (Kara TO %eip6ypao xov EoicopiaX) (Athens 1985). 2 P. Mackridge, 'An editorial problem in Medieval Greek texts: The position of the object clitic pronoun in

This paper provides the first in-depth study of clitic doubling in vernacular Medieval Greek. First, it is shown that the four-part typology (topicalization; right-dislocation; backgrounding; left-dislocation) recently developed on the basis of Modern Greek is perfectly applicable to vernacular Medieval Greek. Moreover, clitic doubling serves the same pragmatic function in Medieval Greek as in many modern spoken languages: it marks an object as the topic of the utterance (as opposed to the focus). For this purpose, the notion of 'topic' is clearly defined and distinguished from the concept of (referential) 'givenness'. Special attention is paid to the distribution of the clitic pronouns, as their position is diagnostic for the topic/focus distinction. Innovatively, the frequent occurrence of clitic doubling in my corpus is associated with the oral discourse which the vernacular texts are acknowledged to adopt. In this regard, two other constructions are discussed: dislocated genitives and dislocated subjects.

The Late Medieval Greek “vernacular” (12th–15th c.) is one of the least studied stages of the history of the Greek language. The lack of interest by linguists can presumably be ascribed to its major source, i.e. metrical πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry. The language of this type of poetry has been labelled a “Kunstsprache”, because of its oral-formulaic character and because of its mixed idiom incorporating vernacular yet also archaizing elements. In this article, however, I demonstrate that the Late Medieval Greek πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry should not automatically be excluded from linguistic research, given that it clearly possesses a strongly vernacular, i.e. spoken, syntactic base: its underlying syntax runs in a very natural way. This is proven by the fact that we can apply the modern linguistic concept of the Intonation Unit, the basic unit of analysis in contemporary spoken(!) languages, to the texts composed in the πολιτικὸς στίχος: far from having an artificial syntax, the πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry is conceptually made up of short, simple “chunks” of information. More precisely, each verse consists of two (stylized) Intonation Units, demarcated by the fixed caesura, which can thus be equated with an Intonation Unit boundary. This thesis is supported by various arguments, both of a metrical and of a syntactico-semantic nature. Arguments belonging to the former category are the length of each half-line, the possibility of stress on the first syllable of each half-line, the origin of the metre, and especially the avoidance of elision at the caesura. In the second category of (syntactico-semantic) evidence, we can consider the tendency of each half-line for constituting a grammatical sense-unit. I also bring forward some little-studied syntactic features of Late Medieval Greek: first, I pay attention to the distribution of the archaizing “Wackernagel particles”, which do not only appear in second position in the verse, but also occur after the first word/constituent following the caesura and thus further confirm my thesis. The same holds for the position of “corrective afterthoughts”, for the verbs and pronominal objects taking the singular are consistently separated from their plural referents by the caesura. Once the Intonation Unit is thus established as a meaningful methodological tool for the analysis of the πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry, the way is cleared for more linguistic research on the Late Medieval Greek vernacular.

The Digenis Akritis is preserved in two important manuscripts: Escorial and Grottaferrata. Whereas the language of the former is traditionally considered vernacular or even vulgar, the scribe of the Grottaferrata manuscript is said to employ an archaizing style. The frequent occurrence of clitic particles like δέ, γάρ, μέν and οὖν is one of the more prominent archaizing features. In Ancient Greek, clitic particles and clitic pronouns tend to cluster together in second position in accordance with Wackernagel's Law. In this note, we examine the various distributional patterns of clitic particles co-occurring with clitic pronouns in the Grottaferrata manuscript. We argue that despite the occurrence of some apparently classical clusterings, the distribution of clitic pronouns and particles is clearly governed by contemporary rules.

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