The extension of the transitive construction in Ancient Greek

Abstract

Paradigmaticity involves obligatoriness. In the case of diathesis, if a language has an active/passive opposition, the possibility for a verb to display it depends on a semantic property of the verb, i.e. transitivity. In Ancient Greek, several verbs that do not take the accusative, but rather the genitive or the dative, also occur in personal passive constructions; the extent to which such verbs can passivize was limited in Homer, but increased in later prose, showing that they were being reanalysed as transitive. Only in the Byzantine period was accusative coding also extended to this group of verbs, through actualization of the preceding reanalysis. Thus, while acquiring the features of the transitive construction, verbs that originally took the dative or the genitive acquired its behaviour (passivization) before overt coding.

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