This book is about thenounphrase (NP) inAncientGreek. It aims toprovide a functional analysis of the factors that determine the structure of theNP, viz. the ordering and articulation of its constituents. In contrast to most modern European languages, in which the ordering of NP elements is rather fixed, the structure of the NP in Ancient Greek is extremely flexible in that the various constituents may occur in almost every possible order and that each constituentmay ormay not be preceded by an article.
As a result of this flexibility, the number of possible NP patterns is enormous. Although one would expect that the existence of so many possibilities would raise questions about the use and function of the various options, the structure of the Ancient Greek NP has received very little attention. Apart from the descriptions in the standard grammars, which generally consist of an overview of the various possibilities withoutmuch attention for the differences in use, the discussion of the structure of the Greek NP is limited to a few studies on the difference between pre- and postnominal adjectives or demonstratives and to some remarks on the articulation of its constituents in general literature on what is often called ‘double definiteness’. There is no systematic analysis of the structure of the Ancient Greek NP. This study attempts to fill this gap. On the basis of a careful analysis of the structure of the NPs in a particular corpus, I will try to answer the question as to which arguments lead a native speaker of Ancient Greek in his choice to select one of the various possible NP patterns. The answer to this question will not only increase our knowledge of the (Ancient Greek) NP, but will—I hope—also result in a better interpretation of Ancient Greek texts.

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