Που in Attic Drama: Evidential Marker and Common Ground Manager

Abstract

In this paper, we offer a detailed analysis of the particle που in Attic drama. We argue that Attic που is a marker of indirect personal evidentiality; it marks, in other words, that the information expressed has been obtained by inference or presumption. Additionally, we hypothesize that που is a pragmatic, intersubjective particle serving to establish or maintain common ground between speaker and addressee. In particular, as a grounding and hedging device, it can convey information with caution, putting speaker and addressee on the same informational level in order not to offend the addressee. In Section 1 we offer a concise statement of our argument and discuss a number of linguistic phenomena relevant to our analysis, most notably evidentiality, common ground, hedging, and grammaticalization (Sections 1.1–1.4). Section 2 outlines our corpus-based methodology and analytical criteria. The body of our paper is devoted to a close linguistic analysis of our corpus (Section 3). Section 4 offers our main conclusions.

Keywords:

• Greek particles
• evidentiality
• Greek tragedy
• Aeschylus
• Sophocles
• Euripides
• Aristophanes

Notes

1 “Hear me, lord, who is somewhere in Lycia in the rich land or in Troy, but who can hear everywhere a troubled man, just as trouble is coming upon me now.”

2 Early modern studies such as Devares’ 1588 book on the Greek particles have not been addressed by current research and might provide counterevidence to this assertion. In fact, Devares (1588, 6) labels που as στοχαστικός, meaning that the particle marks a proposition as being based on conjecture, and hence comes close to assigning it an evidential meaning.

3 “Already with Homer, που does not simply serve in locative meaning, as is well-known, but also, and even more frequently, in the sense of ‘certainly,’ ‘surely,’ in assertions that one is convinced to be correct but one cannot prove to be the case.”

4 Van Rooy (2016) offers a broader overview of evidential morphemes and strategies in Ancient Greek, including several other particles alongside που.

5 See Van Rooy (2016) for an overview and classification of evidential values, with further references. Some earlier analyses of που reflect a correct intuition about the presumptive value of the particle but have failed to link it to evidentiality, either because the category was not yet widely known (e.g. Wackernagel 1895; Bolling 1929) or because the scholars were not familiar with it (Sicking and Ophuijsen 1993).

6 For δή as an evidential particle, see also Tomaka (2020, esp. 79–83, 85–86, 88 and 221), with further references. However, in at least a few instances, Tomaka (2020, e.g. 221) confounds evidentiality with obviousness, wrongly believing that the term evidentiality derives from the adjective evident.

7 Που is not attested in Mycenaean. For the well-known concepts of reanalysis and bridging contexts, see Hopper and Traugott (2003, 39–70). For a recent paper on bridging contexts, with an interesting quantitative analysis, see Larrivée and Kallel (2020).

8 https://perseus.uchicago.edu/; last accessed June 22, 2022.

9 We include in our discussion Prometheus Bound, the authenticity of which has been hotly debated. See our discussion below, after example (6), on the role που can play in this debate.

10 “And if you have said everything, then do us the favor for which we are asking; surely you do remember it.” If possible, we mark how που is reflected in our translations.

11 “It must be something majestic that you’re covering up!”

12 “You’re screaming and snorting again; what will you do – I wonder – when you learn about the other mischief?”

13 “You haven’t done anything worse than these things, have you?”

14 “Say something else to try to exhort and convince me; for this particular argument that you dragged in is surely not acceptable.”

15 “Priam’s ancient city must be groaning aloud, as it learns anew a much-wailing hymn, calling Paris ‘the fatally wedded.’”

16 “One of the gods must have touched his mind.”

17 Ag. 180–183: καὶ παρ᾿ ἄ-/κοντας ἦλθϵ σωφρονϵῖν. / δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βίαιος / σέλμα σϵμνὸν ἡμένων (“And wisdom comes even to those who don’t want it. The favor of the gods, sitting on their majestic throne, is – as we all know – violent”). However, as one reviewer points out, this instance of που might well have to be discarded, since there is substantial evidence in favor of reading the interrogative adverb ποῦ (“where?”) rather than the particle introduced by the sixteenth-century French humanist Adrianus Turnebus, who also changed βιαίως, as found in the manuscripts, into βίαιος (see Pope 1974, 100).

18 “Watch out: Ares is present also in women; but you surely know this well from your own experience.”

19 “For he will not be afraid, I guess, to look at this fresh-drawn blood, if he truly is a descendant of mine.” The variant reading τοῦτόν γϵ is, for instance, adopted by Lloyd-Jones (1994, 82).

20 “In terms of knowledge you probably surpass me, I guess, since you’ve seen the herdsman before.”

21 “But now I guess we’ll pass our days in peace where her [Electra’s] threats are concerned.”

22 “The poor woman, upon hearing this news, will presumably utter a loud wailing through the entire city.”

23 “They’re not arresting you because you didn’t obey the king’s laws, are they?” The collocation οὔ τί που is used in a similar fashion at Phil. 1233: ὦ Ζϵῦ, τί λέξϵις; οὔ τί που δοῦναι νοϵῖς; (“Zeus! What will you say? You’re not planning to give it back, are you?”)

24 “The prisoner you’ve escorted to the house, you presumably know her?”

25 “He was called, I believe, one of Laius’ men.”

26 “But now I’m a slave. For apparently the gods have decided this, and your hand in particular.”

27 “And you indeed have the power to use every law, with regard to both the dead and those who are alive.”

28 Cf. also OT 769–770, for which we would propose a similar analysis in terms of common ground and hedging: ἀξία δέ που μαθϵῖν / κἀγὼ τά γ᾿ ἐν σοὶ δυσφόρως ἔχοντ᾿, ἄναξ (“But I believe I, too, deserve to learn what worries you have, my lord”). Maintaining the common ground is also at stake at Ant. 1255–1256: ϵὖ γὰρ οὖν λέγϵις. / καὶ τῆς ἄγαν γάρ ἐστί που σιγῆς βάρος (“For you are indeed right, as excessive silence is, I guess, a burden, too”).

29 “Why you, of course, since I’m your friend, and such is my word.”

30 “But I see Menelaus here close to the house, swift-footed, who has evidently learned about the misfortune which is going on.”

31 “I guess you know flowery Tmolus by repute.”

32 “For the body is surely not yet out of the house.” Again, the που collocation is followed by γϵ, although its value here is more difficult to ascertain.

33 “You’re not putting me in another house, are you, father?”

34 “Admetus is, we assume, lamenting because of this misery, that he had to be bereft of a virtuous woman?”

35 “Ah me, what can you mean? We’ve not been caught while secretly contriving the boy’s murder, have we?”

36 “You weren’t begging for food, were you? Ah, poor me!”

37 “Surely there’s no one who’ll recognize me upon seeing me, sir?”

38 “Can it be that though I’m in my right mind, my eyesight is deficient?”

39 “Have you then cast off your former enmity, and have you come to pity [the city] now that it has been burnt to ashes by fire?”

40 “He hasn’t dared to perpetrate such a base deed, has he?”

41 “But perhaps, I guess, your brother went in secrecy, and upon his arrival he honored the miserable grave of his father.”

42 “You’re not planning to take away from me what you’ve given me yourself, are you?”

43 “Surely this thing you have tossed around is light.”

44 “Who is that? Surely not Blepyrus, my neighbor?”

45 “Well, that is surely the pole of birds, isn’t it?”

46 “Have I not been saying this for a long time? But you, you won’t listen.”

47 “For surely you were brown from all the farting back then?”

48 There are two other phrases with οὐ … δήπου (Plut. 549 & 587) where Perseus under Philologic reads οὐκοῦν in a declarative sentence, but Henderson (2002a) has οὔκουν in a question. It is difficult to determine which of these two readings Aristophanes intended himself, since both interpretive options are possible.

49 “We’ll buy them with money, of course.”

50 “But first of all there won’t be any slave trader anymore, according to the reasoning you explain yourself, yes indeed!”

51 “Well, you two are truly blinded in your mind by ancient prejudices. Zeus is of course poor, and I’ll explain that fact clearly to you now.”

52 “Well, then you’ll probably have seen the father-killers there, as well as the perjurers, of whom he was speaking?” One might read που adverbially here, as a few lines further (ll. 276–277) Dionysus responds, while probably pointing to the public: νὴ τὸν Ποσϵιδῶ ’γωγϵ, καὶ νυνί γ᾽ ὁρῶ, “I did, by Poseidon, now I see them, too.” However, we are not inclined to read που adverbially, given the word order. που follows a verb in the second person rather than the locative adverb αὐτόθι, suggesting an inference. Alternatively, it might concern a bridging context here, where Aristophanes deliberately played with the ambiguity of the particle and adverb που, expressing both inference and indeterminate spatiality.

53 “I guess you’ll give that to me as market toll.”

54 “[Woman 1] And how will an effeminate assembly of women speak publicly? [Praxagora] Well, by far the best indeed!”

55 “A man who throws away his weapons is a horrible thing, though.”

56 “How great is it to be among wise men, indeed!”