Abstract |
Although it is commonly believed that all adverbs ending in -ως denote
manner, it seems that there are several exceptions. Within this thesis, then, a special
category of those adverbs is examined: The adverbs in -ως which denote time.
The texts selected to be examined are the private letters of Greco-Roman
Egypt. The selection criterion was the language of these texts, which is as close to the
vernacular of ancient times as possible, since precision of utterance is not required in
this type of documents, in contrast to the official ones.
The adverbs were classified into two major groups, depending on the effort
required on the part of the reader to identify the notion of time within their meaning.
In the first group adverbs, in which the notion of time is inherent, were placed:
Therefore, the time is denoted directly by those adverbs. On the other hand adverbs
with indirect temporal nuances were placed in the second group: The indication of
time by those adverbs is detected after the enforcement of pragmatic reasoning.
From the point of semantics, adverbs of the first group answer the question
"when?", and they cannot be analyzed by means of the corresponding adjective,
which derives from the same stem. Instead, adverbs of the second group answer the
question "how?", and they can be semantically analyzed as a function of the
corresponding adjective.
From the point of syntax, adverbs in -ως, as all the adverbials, function as a
complement of a verbal form, either as a part of the verb phrase, or as an external
adverbial phrase. The placement of the adverb in the phrase structure varies, and,
consequently, some adverbs are found before the modified constituent, while others
usually follow that.
From the point of use, some adverbs occur in letters of all three periods,
namely the Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine, while other adverbs occur only in letters dated to specific periods. Finally, there are some adverbs, the use of which in
private letters was influenced by their use in non-epistolary types of documents, and there are also other adverbs, which probably belonged to the informal vocabulary.
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