Phylogenetic systematics, first used for reconstructing biological evolution, has become popular in historical linguistics for reconstructing the development of language families. This dissertation tests three approaches to phylogenetic analysis of the Ancient Greek dialects in order to determine which one best handles borrowing. For character weighting, only reweighting characters according to their CI (consistency index) improved the resolution of the final tree while still giving a plausible tree topology. NeighborNet captured the basic tree topology, but was not able to capture certain important types of borrowing. Combining taxa through a preliminary cluster analysis also produced a single tree with a plausible tree topology. However, all of these methods fail to capture a circular dialect continuum among the Greek dialects, indicating that tree methods alone cannot capture some important types of linguistic development.

This dissertation is a study of the subliterary Latin of Gaul from the fourth to the eighth centuries. The materials studied consist in epigraphic and documentary sources.

The inscriptions of late antique and early medieval Trier and Clermont-Ferrand receive a statistical, philological and comparative analysis, which results in 1) fine-grained decade-by-decade mapping of phonological and morphosyntactic developments, 2) comparative discussion of forms of importance to the chronological and regional development of Vulgar Latin, and, 3) isolation of sociolectal characteristics. Particular attention is paid to the issue of inscription dating based upon linguistic grounds.

This dissertation also approaches papyrus and parchment documents as material culture artifacts. It studies the production, the use, and the characteristics of these documents during the Merovingian period.

This dissertation examines the reception that the Merovingian documents received in the later Middle Ages. This is tied to document destruction and survival, which I argue are the offshoot of two processes: deaccession and reuse. Reuse is tied to the later medieval practice of systematized forgery. Systematized forgeries, in turn, shed light upon the Merovingian originals, thanks to the very high level of systematic interplay between base (the Merovingian documents) and output documents (the forgeries).

This dissertation argues that formulaic phenomena in Homer are best described by using the linguistic concept of construction (borrowed from Construction Grammar). Through a series of case studies, the dissertation explores new possibilities opened by the adoption of this framework, in particular regarding the synchronic and diachronic study of the technique and the study of Homeric word order (i.e., syntax and discourse).

While chapters 1-3 lay the methodological bases for the enterprise, chapters 4-7 explore theoretical and practical issues in the workings of Homeric constructions. Chapter 1, Describing Homer's Technique, frames the goals of the work against the backdrop of earlier research. Chapters 2 (Homeric Formulas and their Definitions) and 3 (Formulas in Linguistics) discuss the topic of formularity within Homeric studies and linguistics, respectively, leading up to the concept of construction in usage-based linguistics and its application to the study of Homer. Chapter 4, Homeric Constructions at Work, explains conventions for the formal notation of Homeric constructions and discusses how constructions have semantic, syntactic, and discourse functions. Chapter 5, The Synchronic Workings of Constructions, discusses how poets acquire constructions during their training, and asks whether constructional habits can be used as diagnostics for individual style; a case study on the epithets of Here illustrates how constructions pass through a life cycle, and how we can use type and token frequency to distinguish innovative constructions from fossilized ones. A study of the famous formula ἀνδροτῆτα καὶ ἥβην `manliness and youth' shows that this formula was created using a regular and productive construction in the technique, and is thus unlikely to preserve phonological or metrical archaisms (as often argued). Chapter 6, The Diachrony of Constructions, integrates the study of how constructions change over time with previous work on the diachronic evolution of the language of Greek epic; a case study illustrates how different speech introduction constructions evolved at different speeds between the Iliad and the Odyssey, depending on their type and token frequencies. Chapter 7, Constructions and the Study of Homeric Discourse, introduces the study of Homeric discourse and covers the principles of referent management, information structure, and word order in Homer.

The Homeric poems’ folk theories of the mental apparatus are primitive, the characters are not very introspective, and the narrators are not particularly concerned with depicting interiority. All of this should not, however, be taken for a lack of characterization or psychological insight on the part of the poet(s). As some scholars have recognized, interiority is not absent; it is implicit. This dissertation makes the implicit explicit. Drawing on four theories or schools of psychoanalysis (object relations, self psychology, attachment theory, and relational psychoanalysis), I show what beliefs, assumptions, and interpersonal templates Achilles and other Homeric characters use to interpret the world, construct their subjective experience, and guide their interactions with others. We see how Achilles’ characteristic ways of relating reflect his mental representations of self and other in interaction.

The first two chapters show how the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in Iliad 1, and therefore the plot of the whole poem, grows out of their personalities. The first chapter explains Agamemnon’s refusal to ransom Chryseis, points out the subtle ways in which Achilles masochistically provokes Agamemnon, and traces Agamemnon’s shifting and contradictory defenses. In the second chapter, I analyze the quarrel proper. The heart of the chapter begins our discussion of narcissism and establishes Achilles’ relational manner and what it implies about his personality. The third chapter shows how Achilles prevents reconciliation with Agamemnon in book 1, introduces the enactment that Achilles repeatedly draws others into, compares his behavior and personality with Thetis’s, and considers his heroism in the context of masochism and narcissism. After first demonstrating that Achilles is narcissistic, the fourth chapter then uses self psychology, object relations theories, and relational psychoanalysis to explain the outcome of the embassy, Achilles’ enactment, and the origins of his narcissism.

I take the characters apart and put them back together to show how they work. Just as an orthopedist might be able to visualize what each bone and muscle are doing as a person moves, we learn to discern what mental processes and representations of self and other are at work as the characters interact with one another.

The dissertation comprises three case studies on the history and prehistory of Homeric language, focusing on the ways in which archaic forms are preserved, and innovated forms created. In the first study I examine Homeric accentuation, together with related issues of morphology and morphophonology, in the u-stem adjectives. Beginning from the archaic oxytones θαμειαί ‘close-set’ and ταρφειαί ‘thick’, I outline the historical developments leading to the paradigmatic feminines in -εῖα, which are based on the masculine/neuter stems, and to the recessively accented adjectives θάλεια ‘abundant’, λάχεια ‘wooded’, λίγεια ‘sweetly sonorous’. I propose that the recessive accent results from the morphological isolation of these words (i.e. they lack a masculine/neuter base), coupled with a subsequent re-accentuation to the default, recessive accent of the language. Turning to Vedic, I will examine its cognate class of adjectives, whose accent is unequivocally oxytone; for instance svād-�v- ‘sweet’ is the masculine/neuter stem to svād-v-ī,́ the feminine. But the morphophonology of the u-stem adjectives requires further study, I argue, and must be set in the broader context of Vedic accentuation. Returning to Greek, I look into a few nouns arguably going back to substantivized adjectives, arguably reflecting zero-grade ablaut of the suffix. Such nouns would correspond precisely with Vedic, where zero-grade ablaut of the suffix is the rule (Ved. –vī)́ : ὄργυια ‘fathom, span of the arms’, ἄγυια ‘street’, and possibly a few others. Taken together, these accentual classes chronicle the history of u-stem morphophonology in Greek.

In the next case study I treat how innovations and archaisms developed within one morphological category, the compound s-stem adjectives. In particular, I investigate anew questions of accents and of ablaut grades: which are archaisms, which innovations? To do so, I offer a revised philological account concerning the various accentual classes of s-stem adjectives, then argue that the recessively s-stem adjectives agree most closely with the largely overlooked Indo-Iranian evidence. Re-examining the evidence for Greek accentuation offers in turn an opportunity to look again at the evidence for archaisms and innovations in Greek ablaut. Greek evidence from zero-grade ablaut in the root of second compound members, such as αἰνοπαθής ‘terribly suffering’, sometimes understood to reflect ancient PIE derivational processes, reflects rather a highly significant innovation in Greek morphology: the class of s-stem adjectives transforms from a denominal to a deverbal class. I will demonstrate that the zero-grade ablaut in the second member reflects the verbal bases from which the adjective derives (in this case the aorist παθεῖν ‘to experience; suffer’). Why the aorist, opposed to the present or perfect stem, so often serves as the verbal basis in deverbal derivation will be a question I can pose, but cannot fully answer. Finally, I will work through the Indo-Iranian– effectively just Vedic– evidence for accent and ablaut in the cognate class of s-stem adjectives. I will establish first a philologically sound position for the varying accentual classes in Vedic, then will ask in what ways the Indo-Iranian evidence corresponds to the Greek. This re-examination of the combined evidence of Greek and of Vedic leads to a substantially revised picture of the derivational morphology of s-stem adjectives in the protolanguage.

The last study casts a wider net, turning to issues in the transmission of Homeric poetry across Greek dialects and across generic boundaries. I focus the case study on one form found in one formula, φρασί ‘in mind’ in the hemistich φρασὶν ἄλλα μενοινῶν, incontestably the older form of the dative plural of φρήν (for Cl.Gk. φρεσί), but only contestably “Homeric”. The hemistich with φρασί is inscribed on a funerary monument in Attica, but paradoxically may not be evidence for the Attic dialect at all: φρασί with a-vocalism closes a Homeric verse-end formula (Hom. φρεσὶν ἄλλα μενοινῶν), but in Homer only φρεσί is ever found; and φρασί is unknown to all other Attic documents, while found abundantly– and more abundantly than the lexica and handbooks let on– in texts of the Doric West (Pindar, Stesichorus, and the Orphic leaves). In our study, complications of language and genre come to the fore: Why use a Doric form in an Attic epigram? Why use a Homeric formula in an elegiac couplet inscribed upon a funerary monument?

In this dissertation, I investigated the usage of subordinators in Ancient Greek dialectal inscriptions and their interactions with supradialectal formulas, i.e., relatively fixed expressions shared across dialectal borders. Subordinators are grammatical elements and therefore are expected to behave in a systematic manner; supradialectal formulas are expected to provide a “test tube”, revealing how different dialects express the same notion. As the first step, I compiled an up-to-date collection of known attestations of subordinators in the dialects of Mainland Greece. Using this collection, I investigated the interactions of local dialects and the standard language in the contexts of fixed expressions and creative composition. In some cases, the confinement of a subordinator into a fixed expression suggests its inactive status in the dialect, and in contrast, the active status of a subordinator is illustrated by its appearances in supradialectal formulas replacing non-local subordinators. Uses of non-local subordinators often result from the predominance of the standard language, but sometimes from the borrowing of phraseological units as a whole rather than the borrowing of the subordinator alone.

``Productivity'' is a simultaneously familiar and fraught topic for all linguists. Every linguist believes that he can recognize it, yet grasping what properties characterize a ``productive'' process in opposition to a non-productive one is difficult. The historical linguist ought to be particularly desperate for a definition that can be operationalized -- distinguishing archaism from innovation depends upon it. This dissertation is therefore first concerned with transforming ''productivity'' into an object that can be interrogated, and then seeking tools that can provide a useful characterization that object. On the explicitly diachronic side, I am concerned with how to measure, diagnose, and motivate changes in productivity. Corpora from two the oldest-attested Indo-European languages, Ancient Greek (here, mainly the Iliad and Odyssey, as well as the New Testament) and Vedic Sanskrit (here, mainly the R̥gveda) will guide and define these explorations. Within the realm of morphology and word-formation especially, I will argue that concerns about productivity rightly take pride of place in diachronic discussion, and that those discussions become more meaningful when made precise and psychologically motivated. This increased precision offers hope of accounting for diverse linguistic phenomena for which the presence or absence of morphological structure is a crucial determinant. Overall, this work calls for the increased usage of corpus-based quantitative methods and computational modeling in the study of language change.