The Prosody of Greek Speech

The reconstruction of the prosody of a dead language is on the face of it an almost impossible undertaking. However once a general theory of prosody has been developed from eliable data in living languages it is possible to exploit texts as sources of answers to questions that would normally be answered in the laboratory. In this work the authors interpret the evidence of Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on crosslinguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data and reconstruct the syllable structure rhythm accent phrasing and intonation of classical Greek speech. Sophisticated statistical analyses are employed to support an impressive range of new findings which relate not only to phonetics and phonology but also to pragmatics and the syntax-phonology interface.