The Syntax and Semantics of the Perfect Active in Literary Koine Greek

While linguists and scholars have been poring over Koine Greek literary works for centuries, the semantics of the perfect tense continues to be a vexing issue in ancient Greek linguistics. Incorporating the most recent linguistic insights from both the neo-Davidsonian and Chomskyan traditions, The Syntax and Semantics of the Perfect Active in Literary Koine Greek offers a unified, comprehensive semantic description of the perfect and pluperfect in literary Koine Greek. In addition to consolidating material from contemporary authors, noted classical scholar Robert Crellin draws on a large corpus of extant Koine Greek works--including the writings of Josephus, Polybius, Appian, and Plutarch--to address temporal problems of the perfect and pluperfect in Koine Greek, as well as linguistic issues relating to transitivity. After examining the behaviour of the perfect form from a lexical semantic standpoint, chapters incorporate syntactic and semantic frameworks to provide an account of the perfect in terms of the causative alternation and aspectual classes of predicate. Revelatory and thought-provoking, The Syntax and Semantics of the Perfect Active in Literary Koine Greek offers illuminating insights into the precise meanings of the literary and scholarly writings of the ancient Greeks.