Conjunctive Adverbs and Discourse Markers : Problems and Evidence from Ancient Greek

Abstract

This paper approaches conjunctive adverbs in Ancient Greek as a subset of the so-called discourse markers. Conjunctive adverbs have been defined and described within Functional Grammar as connective units which go beyond sentence boundaries. From a discourse-oriented perspective, these units could be also considered discourse markers. The concepts of conjunctive adverb and discourse marker are highly problematic. Overlapping these two approaches to the same lexical items gives us the opportunity of revisiting definitions, features and parameters, in order to have a clearer view of the roles performed by these words in actual texts. To illustrate the discussion, a number of passages coming from different Classical Greek types of texts are provided.