Anaphora, Deixis, and Word Order: Syntactic Patterns and Constraints in Ancient Greek Grammatical Theory.

This contribution explores some particular syntactic patterns in Ancient Greek word order, concerning the relative position of determiners in the Nominal Phrase (NP). The discussion is based on ancient thought about language and about word order in language, especially focusing on two opposite perspectives: the stylistic comments provided by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st century BC) and the grammatical theory developed by Apollonius Dyscolus (2nd century AD). The latter highlights some syntactic constraints operating in the structure of the NP, which Apollonius describes in his own metalanguage by means of the notions of anaphora and deixis. According to Apollonius, an expression such as * ho agathós ho anér (=the good the man) is impossible since anaphora is a property of nouns and not of adjectives or attributes, whereas * ho hoûtos anér (=the that man) is not allowed in Ancient Greek, since deixis is a property of pronouns, and cannot be articulated.