Introduction

Abstract

Studying Ancient Greek offers new insights for linguistic theory. Thanks to the amount of available written data of a large corpus at our disposal, it is possible for a linguist to test hypotheses from modern theories in order to explain language phenomena, without disregarding a description according to methodologies adopted in traditional analyses of ancient languages. In particular, the morphological complexity of the Greek verb with its highly intricate inflectional system provide a valuable basis for an in-depth-analysis of the mechanisms which regulate the functioning of a language in the mind of the speaker. Crucially, in recent times also deductive methodologies adopted in the generative framework have been successfully applied with this purpose to the study of ancient languages (see, among others, Kiss 2005). On the other hand, and as is well known to historical linguists and Indo- Europeanists, studies on the Ancient Greek verb have contributed significantly to the reconstruction of the Indo-European language since the early history of Linguistics in the ninetheenth-century. The conservative features preserved in the oldest stages of Greek allow us to rely on a solid basis to which every linguist in investigating a model of the Proto-Indo-European verb must refer (see more recently Haverling 2010: 287).