The Complexity of Epic Diction

Abstract

This article offers a revised interpretation of the relationship between form and meaning in Greek epic hexameter diction, binding our understanding of traditional language and idiolects as well as patterns and their exception within a single, systematic approach. The article draws on methodological (and underlying philosophical) principles embedded in contemporary cognitive functional linguistics, usage-based grammar, and the study of language as a complex adaptive system (which emerges from the study of complexity in the sciences). Fundamental to work within these fields in recent decades is the rejection of paradigmatic linguistic approaches (such as traditional Greek and Latin grammar, Saussure and his emphasis on langue, Chomskyan transformations) and the polarities of form and content paradigmatic analysis often assumes. Usage-based linguistics place emphasis on signification and symbolic functions, communicative exchange, and contingent historical evolutionary processes as the primary realities of language and language formation. Grammar is regarded, not as an underlying universal structure, but as an epiphenomenal linguistic symptom. The study of complexity in linguistics expands such perspectives to provide a deep, scientific argument that binds rule-based usage and unpredictable exceptions and anomalies within a single, integrated system. Key elements of these perspectives can be extrapolated already from Milman Parry’s early observations on analogy—even as the full implications of these observations could not have been understood within the historical framework of Parry’s methodology. Various examples from the Iliad and the Odyssey, especially the usage of the formula ton d’ apameibomenos, illustrates the argument for the complexity of epic diction.