Reporting Someone Else’s Speech: The Use of the Optative and Accusative-and-Infinitive as Reportative Markers in Herodotus’ Histories

Abstract

This article provides a pragma-semantic account of the oblique optative and accusative-and-infinitive in Ancient Greek. The proposed account analyses certain seemingly anomalous uses as special cases of a general meaning. The core idea is that we view their contribution as one of the presupposition triggers. The presupposed information that they trigger is that the content of the clause is said by someone. This analysis is then used to explain the usefulness of the constructions. As we will see, they facilitate a faithful rendering of original discourse relations without losing the information that it is a report, something which, as I will argue, is especially useful for Herodotus’ way of doing historiography. Thus, the article combines a linguistic and narratological perspective. It focuses on Ancient Greek, but at the same time provides a case study of how authors use the inventory of their language to find a midpoint between speaking in their own voice and representing the speech of others.

Keywords

• speech reports
• reportative evidentiality
• optative
• accusative-and-infinitive
• semantics
• presuppositions