The decline of infinitival complementation in Ancient Greek

Abstract

Several reasons have been proposed for the decline of infinitival complementation in Ancient Greek: the fact that the infinitive became morphologically restricted, the inherent redundancy of the Classical complementation system, and language contact. In this article, I explore yet another reason for the decline of the infinitive: I argue that the system of infinitival complementation became fundamentally ambiguous in its expression in later Greek. As has been noted previously, the loss of the future and perfect tense had a serious impact on the use of infinitival complementation. However, rather than there being an ‘omission’ of temporal distinctions, as previous studies have claimed, I argue that the present and aorist infinitive became polyfunctional, being used for anterior, simultaneous, and posterior events. Next to temporal ambiguity, a second type of ambiguity occurred: ‘modal’ ambiguity or ambiguity with regard to the speech function of the complement clause. Already in Classical times, the present and aorist infinitive could be used after certain verb classes to encode both ‘propositions’ and ‘proposals’ (offers/commands), an ambiguity which continues to be found in later Greek. The study is based on a corpus of documentary texts from the Roman and Byzantine periods (I – VIII AD).