Discourse marker development in epistolary contexts: Ἰδού ‘look!’ in the Greek epistolary papyri

Abstract

In this paper I analyse the shifting usage of the Discourse Marker ἰδού in the Greek papyri corpora of epistolary nature dating from the 3rd c. BC to the 5th c. AD. My methodology is largely based on the account of grammaticalization as presented in Traugott and Dasher (2001), and pays particular attention to the questions of pragmatic inference, syntactic scope, modality and politeness. I claim that the distribution of usages we find in the papyri corpora can be understood as an outcome of development of ἰδού alongside several different paths: first from an exophoric deictic marker to an endophoric deictic marker, and then from a deictic marker to a marker of epistemic force and adversativity, an emphatic marker and a marker of reproach, and a politeness marker.