Giving Gifts and Doing Favours - (Brill's Studies in Historical Linguistics) by Victoria Beatrix Fendel (Hardcover)

About the Book

Support-verb constructions, like 'to make a suggestion' and 'to take heart', are an integral, enriching, and natural part of the classical Greek lexicon-grammar rather than stylistic, register-related, or redundant as often claimed, yet they remain a pain in the neck even 20 years after Sag's seminal article.

Book Synopsis

Support-verb constructions, like 'to make a suggestion' or 'to take heart', are verbal multi-word expressions. They are lexically, morphosyntactically, semantically, and pragmatically versatile and thus form an integral, enriching, and natural part of the classical Greek lexicon grammar. Taking heart does not involve barbarism and taking a picture does not involve theft, yet how does one know that for a corpus language like classical literary Attic Greek? This book embraces the diversity of this internally heterogenous group of constructions which sit at three interfaces.