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Description:
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The future has exercised students of Modern Greek language developments for
many years, and no satisfactory set of arguments for the development of the
modern form from the ancient usages has ever been produced. Theodore
Markopoulos elucidates the stages that led up to the appearance of the
modern future in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He does so by
focussing on the three main modes of future referencing ('mello', 'echo',
and 'thelo'). He discusses these patterns in the classical and
Hellenistic-Roman periods, the early medieval period (fifth to tenth
centuries), and the late medieval period (eleventh to fifteenth centuries).
The argument is supported by reference to a large and representative corpus
of texts (all translated into English) from which the author draws many
examples. In his conclusion Dr. Markopoulos considers the implications of
his findings and methodology for syntactic and semantic history of Greek.
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