Tense-switching in classical Greek: a cognitive approach

"Tense is at its most interesting when it behaves badly. In this book Arjan Nijk investigates the variation between the past and present tenses to refer to past events in Classical Greek and beyond. Adopting a cognitive approach to the issue, he argues that the use of the present for preterite depends on the activation of implicit conceptual scenarios in which the gap between the past and the present is bridged. The book is distinguished from previous accounts by its precision in describing these conceptual scenarios, the combination of linguistic theorising with philological and statistical methods, the size of the corpus under investigation and the explicitly cross-linguistic scope. It provides a complete overview of the phenomenon of tense switching in Classical Greek, as well as new theoretical perspectives on deixis and viewpoint, and is important for classicists, narratologists and linguists of every stamp"--

Cover -- Half-title -- Title page -- Copyright information -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- I.1 The Meaning of Tense-Switching -- I.1.1 Cognitive Linguistics, Deixis and Viewpoint -- I.1.2 Tense and the Experience of Time -- I.2 Questions and Aims -- I.2.1 The Semantics of Tense-Switching -- I.2.2 Three Usages in Classical Greek -- I.2.2.1 Scenic Narrative and the Mimetic Present -- I.2.2.2 Summary Narrative and the Diegetic Present -- I.2.2.3 Zero-Degree Narrativity and the Registering Present

I.3 Conceptualising Time: Theoretical Background -- I.4 Tense, Aspect and Actionality in Classical Greek -- I.4.1 Tense -- I.4.2 Aspect -- I.4.3 Tense and Grammatical Aspect: Morphological Ambiguity -- I.4.4 Actionality -- I.4.5 Distinguishing Aspect from Actionality -- I.4.6 Takeaways -- I.5 A Note on the Translations -- Chapter 1 General Conceptual Model -- 1.1 Introduction -- 1.2 The Semantics of the Present Tense -- 1.2.1 Temporal Neutrality -- 1.2.2 Epistemic Immediacy -- 1.3 Bridging the Gap between the Near and the Far: Two Conceptual Scenarios -- 1.3.1 Displacement versus Representation

1.3.2 Representa…