The emergence of the hoi epêlthe ptareîn impersonal construction in Ancient Greek

Abstract

This paper focuses on the spread of a particular impersonal construction featuring an argument structure with a dative or accusative coded argument and a noun clause in Ancient Greek. It aims to demonstrate that the construction under analysis expands in its functional domain considerably over time, both in terms of productivity and frequency. Furthermore, it argues that the spread of this impersonal construction was facilitated by a bridging context involving neutral alignment, where some subject properties are lost both on a semantic (agentivity, referentiality) and on a morphosyntactic level (dedicated encoding, verb agreement), such as when a neuter pronoun takes the subject function.