4. A diachronic perspective on the semantics of AcI clauses in Greek

Examining a Hypothesis about the Past‐Oriented Aorist Infinitive in Post‐Classical Greek

“…Table also suggests that a particularly common clause was the type A–P; an example is passage (7) above. It is attested from the Early Hellenistic period (Kavčič 2017b: 98) up until (at least) the third century ad . In the third century ad it is found in P.Ryl.…”

“…Indeed, this is the case, as I have shown in Kavčič (2017a: 36–41). However, these instances are highly uncommon in relative terms and are unexpectedly low if it is taken into account that, as mentioned above, in declarative infinitive clauses the aorist infinitive represents the function of the aorist indicative of finite clauses, and that the aorist indicative was the most frequent indicative in Greek (see Kavčič 2017b: 94–5).…”

“…According to the hypothesis examined (hereinafter Hypothesis 1), this process resulted from the aspectual, non‐temporal value of the aorist infinitive and the spread of the perfect in the cross‐linguistic sense of the word (Haspelmath ). The hypothesis is based on my previous studies (Kavčič , , 2017a, 2017b), parts of which were recently discussed in Bentein (). Whereas these previous studies focused on documents (mostly) from the Roman period, this paper examines this hypothesis against a much larger corpus, which contains private and business letters dating to between the third century bc and the sixth century ad .…”

“…This final decline is expected from the perspective of the general infinitive loss (cf. Bentein : 20; Kavčič 2017b: 104). On the other hand, it is perhaps only a coincidence that in the period from the second century bc to the first century ad absolute numbers of instances of declarative infinitive clauses are somehow lower than in the second century ad .…”

“… Bentein () mostly comments on my article that he cites as Kavčič (forthcoming), which is equivalent to Kavčič (2017b). I suggested in that article that the decline of past‐oriented aorist infinitives in Post‐Classical Greek was related to the tendency of declarative infinitive clauses toward omitting temporal distinctions, as well as conveying simultaneous states.…”