The chapter starts by explaining the difference between Pragmatics and Semantics and their complementary roles within the study of meaning in language, explaining the role of context in the determination of utterance meaning. It introduces the basic concepts and research areas of Pragmatics with sections on deixis, presupposition, speech acts and conversational implicatures.  These are followed by questions and exercises as well as suggestions for further reading.

The Cypriot Greek koine displays structural innovations, arguably as a result of prolonged contact with Standard Greek (SG), the ‘H’ variety in the diglossic context of the Greek Cypriot speech community. Periphrastic perfect forms are among such innovations. As regards the Past Perfect, in Standard Greek it has the principal reading of past in the past, as well as a remote past use; in contrast, the Cypriot Greek Past Perfect is largely interchangeable with the Aorist (Simple Perfective Past) and it may be deployed for pragmatic purposes, e.g. to mark an important point in a narrative, possibly due to its relative formality. In recent work it was claimed that this innovation is specific to Cypriot Greek. This paper revisits this hypothesis on the basis of the observation that Standard Greek also seems to display partly similar patterns. Using naturalistic data and data from a grammaticality judgement task, we explore (a) whether such variation is sociolinguistically conditioned and (b) what the semantics and pragmatics of the innovative Past Perfect are in each variety.

Η Κυπριανή Κοινή παρουσιάζει δομικές καινοτομίες οι οποίες μπορεί να υποστηριχθεί ότι αποτελούν αποτέλεσμα της μακρόχρονης επαφής της με την Κοινή Νέα Ελληνική (ΚΝΕ), την υψηλή ποικιλία στο διγλωσσικό περιβάλλον της ελληνοκυπριακής γλωσσικής κοινότητας. Μία από αυτές τις καινοτομίες είναι και οι περιφραστικοί συντελικοί χρόνοι, παρακείμενος και υπερσυντέλικος. Σε ό,τι αφορά τον υπερσυντέλικο, στην ΚΝΕ χαρακτιρίζεται κυρίως από την ερμηνεία του προτερόχονου στο παρελθόν, καθώς και από τη χρήση του για αναφορά στο μακρινό παρελθόν. Αντιθέτως, στην Κυπριακή Ελληνική (ΚΕ) ο υπερσυντέλικος εναλλάσσεται ελεύθερα με τον αόριστο (απλό συνοπτικό παρελθοντικό) και μπορεί να επιστρατεύεται για πραγματολογικούς σκοπούς, π.χ. για να τονίσει ένα σημαντικό σημείο σε μια αφήγηση, ενδεχομένως λόγω της σχετικά μεγαλύτερης επισημότητάς του. Σε πρόσφατη έρευνα έχει υποστηριχθεί ότι αυτό αποτελεί αποκλειστική καινοτομία της ΚΕ. Η παρούσα μελέτη επανεξετάζει αυτή την υπόθεση στη βάση της παρατήρησης ότι η ΚΝΕ παρουσιάζει παρόμοιες χρήσεις. Χρησιμοποιώντας αυθόρμητα προφορικά δεδομένα και δεδομένα από ερωτηματολόγια για τον χαρακτηρισμό προτάσεων ως προς τη γραμματικότητά τους ερευνούμε (α) αν η παρατηρούμενη ποικιλότητα καθορίζεται από κοινωνιογλωσσικούς παράγοντες και (β) ποια είναι τα νεοτερικά σημασιολογικά και πραγματολογικά χαρακτηριστικά του υπερσυντέλικου σε κάθε ποικιλία.

This paper examines Greek invitations as first pair parts of an adjacency pair within the framework of Conversation Analysis. The focus of our research is on impromptu invitations issued via polar negative-interrogative constructions and the effects this type of construction has on the interactional organization of the whole invitation-response sequence. It is suggested that the issuing of the invitation by means of this particular syntactic choice has ramifications for the unfolding of the interaction with respect to sequencing and preference organization. Specifically, it is maintained that impromptu invitations issued by means of polar negative-interrogatives in Greek tend to trigger markedly delayed acceptances. It is suggested that the explanation for this phenomenon lies in the “cross-cutting” preferences built in the construction when used to make impromptu invitations.

Aspect is more or less universally recognized as the defining TMA category of the Greek verbal system. There is a consensus on this in both the philological tradition and the linguistic literature on aspect. It is moreover almost universally accepted that diachronically the Greek verbal system has been extremely conservative, remaining practically unchanged down to the present day.This paper largely accepts the former assumption, but not the latter, which has been increasingly challenged in the last few years. It is argued here that, while there has been little change morphologically, the system has been altered in a fundamental way. More specifically, it takes up the analysis proposed in Moser (2008 and 2009), according to which the history of the Greek verb indicates that the system of three (and later two) stems shifts from the expression of Aktionsart (actionality/lexical aspect) to the expression of (grammatical) aspect, and develops it further, taking a fresh look at the data from a different point of view and in the light of recent studies.

The aim of this paper is to show that the knowledge of the history of Greek after the New Testament and the knowledge of its outcome, i.e. Modern Greek, can provide the tools for a better understanding of some of the linguistic problems presented by New Testament Greek. The testing ground for this claim will be aspect and its relationship to Aktionsart and tense. The paper starts with a brief overview of the Modern Greek verbal system in comparison to the Classical Greek verb, continues with a brief discussion of a theoretical approach to tense and aspect and its application to Modern Greek, and proceeds retrospectively, examining the situation in Early, Classical and New Testament Greek in the light of the Modern Greek data .

This article proposes an analysis of the historical changes in the aspectual system of Greek as a process of grammaticalization and subjectification, thus challenging the traditional view of Greek verbal aspect as a stable and in fact extremely conservative category, possibly very close to that of Proto-Indo- European. Specifically, the claim put forward here is that the original tripartite morphological opposition (Aorist – Present – Perfect stems) expressed Aktionsart, i.e. lexical aspect, distinctions (punctuality/telicity– durativity/atelicity–state, respectively) while the modern binary morpho- logical opposition (Aorist–Present stems) expresses the purely aspectual perfective–imperfective opposition. Since Aktionsart is based on inherent features of the action/state denoted by the verb while aspect expresses the speaker’s point of view, this constitutes a shift from objectivity to subjectivity as well as a somewhat atypical grammaticalization process. Keywords: gradient; perfective; progressive; habitual; perfect 

The topic of this paper seems perhaps over-ambitious, touching as it does on several questions which have become serious theoretical issues over the last decades and some of them over several centuries. The controversy on the nature of grammatical categories has marked Philosophy and Linguistics throughout the twentieth century; the more modest controversy on aspect and its relationship to the disputed category Aktionsart, as well as its relationship to tense, has been dealt with in a vast amount of literature.This short paper cannot provide a definitive answer; it has the more modest aim of showing     a) that Greek aspect and Aktionsart form a continuum     b) that the two categories remain nevertheless distinctand thus hopefully contribute to the broader discussion on gradience, in particular intersective gradience, as defined by Aarts (2007).

Intuition dictates that figurative language and especially metaphorical expressions should convey sentiment. It is the aim of this work to validate this intuition by showing that figurative language (metaphors) appearing in a sentence drive the polarity of that sentence. Towards this target, the current article proposes an approach for sentiment analysis of sentences where figurative language plays a dominant role. This approach applies Word Sense Disambiguation aiming to assign polarity to word senses rather than tokens. Sentence polarity is determined using the individual polarities for metaphorical senses as well as other contextual information. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method achieves high scores in comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches tested on the same corpora. Finally, experimental results provide supportive evidence that this method is also well suited for corpora consisting of literal and figurative language sentences.

This paper explores the role of meso- and macro-context in the interpretation of text, on the basis of our research on the text of Greek laws. The use of the grammatical categories of tense, aspect and modality in these texts deviates from everyday use (Panaretou 2005, Moser and Panaretou 2009).The study is based on a comparison of native speakers’ judgements (elicited through questionnaires and interviews and subjected to qualitative analysis) on law texts and everyday contexts containing the performance of the same type of speech act as the law: a mother setting a rule for her children and delineating the consequences of breaking this rule. Uses judged unanimously as ungram- matical and unacceptable in the latter context went unnoticed in law texts.Our conclusion is that what licenses deviant uses is not the type of speech act, but the genre of law texts; it is argued that, as a form of meso-context, the genre of law texts, by virtue of being highly institutionalized within the cognitive and socio-cultural context in which it is embedded (Fetzer 2004, 2007), creates a cognitive frame so powerful as to impose specific interpretations even to grammatical forms which would be unacceptable in different (con)texts. 

Greek has always been assumed to possess a verbal system organized on the basis of aspect, with tense playing only a secondary part, and to have retained this state of affairs throughout its history. This article claims that it has changed substantially, moving from the expression of oppositions of Aktionsart (states – telic activities – atelic activities) to the expression of oppositions of grammatical aspect (perfective – imperfective) and tense (past – non past and later past – present – future). The current system is claimed to display an almost perfect balance between tense and aspect. Keywords: tense; aspect; verbal system; Aktionsart; perfectivity

Greek is assumed to be particularly conservative in terms of its verbal system, which is supposed to have always been organised on the basis of the grammatical category of aspect. This paper claims that, on the contrary, a major change has occurred between the early stages, as seen in the Homeric poems, and Modern Greek. Originally, the three stems of the verb represented the three main types of Aktionsart: states (Perfect), telic activities (Aorist) and atelic activities (Present). Through a gradual grammaticalization process the Aorist and Present stems came to express the binary aspectual distinction of perfectivity and imperfectivity, a change that explains the loss of the third stem. Christidis’s astute observations about the role of ideological constructs in the perception of language change explain the failure of scholars to notice this rather striking difference between the ancient and the modern system. 

The paper takes up the question of the finiteness of the subjunctive, in particular the Greek subjunctive. Taking into account discussions within the gene­rative framework, it adopts the position that the sub­junctive is indeed finite, and examines the main stumbling block in this direction, namely its uni­versally acknowledged lack of semantic tense. It challenges this assumption, analysing a subset of its uses, that in na-complements, in an attempt to show that there is a temporal dimension to the sub­junctive even in its narrowest sense (when the only choice available is between the three aspectually opposed forms): the event it denotes is always placed at a time posterior to that of matrix verbs with a deontic meaning and contemporaneous to that of matrix verbs with a sensory/perceptual meaning.

This article argues that the forms in -ontas, labeled participles or gerunds in the literature are in reality verbal adverbs or converbs. This hypothesis is tested on the basis of the cross- linguistic criteria proposed in Ηaspelmath & Κönig (eds., 1995). Special emphasis is placed on finiteness, which creates problems for these forms if defined in terms of agreement and tense/aspect specification. Ιt is shown that the forms are specified for both aspect and relative tense, but it is argued that this does not prevent them from being non-finite; on a scale of finiteness they would in fact be placed at a rather low point both within Greek and cross-linguisticalΙy and this not only allows them to be categorized as converbs, given that they meet aΙl the other criteria, but places them among the prototypical exponents of the category. 

This paper explores the relationship of the perfect with time, in its grammatical expression both as tense and as aspect. While not denying that the perfect has other, non-temporal and non-aspectual uses, while in fact admitting that they are more wide-spread than its time-related uses, it argues that a relationship with time does exist; of the various time-related meanings associated with the perfect it is anteriority that turns out to be more “basic”, in the sense that all the other meanings of the perfect can be derived from it. The article has a strong historical bias: the basic meaning is assumed to have a historical precedence as well as a logical one. 

This paper examines the relative status of the various forms of the Perfect in Modern Greek within the theoretical framework of Grammaticalization, arguing that only one of these, namely the ekho+infinitive form, is a genuine perfect periphrasis; it also deals with the implications that such an analysis would have for the explanation of the diachronic evolution of the Perfect.