Particles project
Hello! The particles project is a ‘Forschungsprojekt’ funded by the ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’, through an ‘Emmy-Noether Programme’ (click here for more information). When I wrote the proposal I dreamt about having time, resources, and a team to investigate what the so-called ‘particles’ accomplish across different genres in ancient Greek literature. As I mostly worked on lyric and epic so far, it is now a great pleasure to devote special attention to prose narratives, and in particular to observe the strategies enacted by Herodotus and Thucydides to tell and to comment on historical events.
Beyond our research group meetings, I started sharing my thoughts about particles in historiography at the first of our Emmy-Noether workshops (November 2011). On 24 January 2012 I presented different remarks of the role of particles in the “Plague” (Thucydides 2.47-54) during a Thucydides class (taught by Dr. Schwab) at our department of Classics. At the end of March I gave a paper at the CAMWS meeting (in Baton Rouge, USA) on quite different discourse functions kai contributes to in Thucydidean prose (kai is the most frequent particle in Thucydides, with 10,231 instances!).
When I look at particles, sentence adverbials, and conjunctions as the text unfolds, I am interested in learning about clause combining patterns, on the one hand, and in inferring mismatches between syntactical units and discourse acts, on the other. The analysis of clause combining allows me to account for the sequential steps of discourse beyond syntactical hierarchies, (this actually corresponds to a quantitative fact, that is, a much higher employment of particles than of subordinating conjunctions in both authors). The analysis of discourse acts (whether involving particles or not) adds, I believe, to the study of prose colometry, which started about 80 years ago, and now seems to have gathered momentum again.
Great empirical and theoretical input to the work on these phenomena comes from another joint research project I started earlier, which focuses on the linguistic and non-linguistic articulation of a Serbocroatian epic poem recorded by Milman Parry in 1934. Monosyllabic particles and interjections hardly work as ‘fillers’; especially in connection with the melodic contours underlying the verbal utterances, in that tradition they guide the listener (and the singer as well) by marking the progress of the song almost step by step. This is why I organized—and greatly profited from—an interdisciplinary panel at the 2011 International Pragmatics Association Conference, titled “Discourse organization in oral traditions and in literatures of the past: the interface between linguistic and para-/extra-linguistic features.”
Anna Bonifazi
