Markopoulos T. The Future in Greek: From Ancient to Medieval

Oxford University Press, 2009. — 288 p.
ISBN: 0199539855The future has exercised students of Modern Greek language developments for many years, and no satisfactory set of arguments for the development of the modern form from the ancient usages has ever been produced. Theodore Markopoulos elucidates the stages that led up to the appearance of the modern future in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He does so by focussing on the three main modes of future referencing (‘mello’, ‘echo’, and ‘thelo’). He discusses these patterns in the classical and Hellenistic-Roman periods, the early medieval period (fifth to tenth centuries), and the late medieval period (eleventh to fifteenth centuries). The argument is supported by reference to a large and representative corpus of texts (all translated into English) from which the author draws many examples. In his conclusion Dr Markopoulos considers the implications of his findings and methodology for syntactic and semantic history of Greek.Abbreviations
List of Tables
List of FiguresIntroduction: aims, theory, and method
Classical Greek (5th–3rd c. bc): the origins
Hellenistic–Roman Greek (3rd c. bc–4th c. ad): proliferation of AVCs
Early Medieval Greek (5th–10th c. ad): the misty transition
Late Medieval Greek (11th–15th c. ad): the dominance of a single AVC
Conclusions
Appendix: Abbreviations of textsPrimary sources
Secondary sources
Name Index
Subject Index