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In this article, I discuss the use and absence of the augment in the 3rd singular forms ἔθηκε(ν) and θῆκε(ν) in the Iliad. In the previous article (De Decker 2020), I explained why I chose this corpus and determined the value of the different forms. Here I proceed to the actual analysis of the forms: do they confirm the previous syntactic and semantic observations that have been made for the use and absence of the augment (the clitic rule by Drewitt and Beck, the reduction rule by Kiparsky and the distinctions: speech versus narrative, foreground versus background and remote versus recent past)?

The augment in Homeric past tenses is an optional feature. In this thesis, I study the coexistence of augmented and unaugmented verbs in Homer, offering an overview and a discussion of the literature on the topic, and suggest a new approach to the phenomenon from a syntactic and textual perspective. The aim of this work is to describe, on a synchronic level, some of the distributional tendencies of the augment and to explore if these tendencies are related to its diachronic reconstruction as a temporal marker. Having first considered the phenomenon within a Comparative Philology framework, I then highlight the distribution of augmented and unaugmented verbs in Homer through a detailed investigation of scholarship on this matter. I then give an account of the different opinions on the reconstruction of the original function and morphology of the augment, also underlining how Homeric data can contribute to this general debate. The comparison and discussion of the various proposals suggest that the more reliable theory is the reconstruction of the augment as a temporal marker. In the second part of the thesis, I present a personal analysis of a corpus of four books from the Iliad. The textual analysis of the data shows that the presence or absence of the augment is often related to narrative effects or strategies. Syntactic analysis, carried out within a Generative Grammar framework, then explores whether augmented and unaugmented verbs have different syntactic behaviour. Results from this investigation illustrate that the syntactic distribution of augmented and unaugmented verbs constistently match with certain narrative effects. In the conclusion, having presented the time related information given by tenses as a complex structure, I try to discuss how the augment in Homer can be considered a temporal marker and I explore whether tendencies which have emerged from my analysis can be related to this interpretation.

A study of the so-called zero-forms of the present tense 3rd person singular and plural (without inflectional -tb) in the birch bark manuscripts has once again attracted the attention of researchers to this grammatical phenomenon. Andrey Zaliznyak established the zero-forms usage positions and their range and functions, and he arrived at the conclusion that they are Novgorod dialectisms. Analysis of the Old Slavonic and written sources of the Russian Southwest found similarities with the Novgorod birch bark manuscripts, so the zero-forms should be considered Proto-Slavic dialectisms, inherited by different Old Russian dialects and tracing back to the injunctive and the conjunctive, its later substitute. At the same time, data correlation showed the narrowness of the birch bark manuscripts' discursive range. A. Zaliznyak discovered several je 'is' word forms in a supposedly enclitic function. He noted, however, that there was a lack of material for drawing final conclusions. The present paper provides evidence of the je word form usage in the function of Wackernagel enclitics in different sources, especially in the 11th century Sinaiskii Paterik (Pratum spiritual), where, as it turns out, this type of enclitic was closely related with an interrogative sentence type, not always functioning as a link-verb and meaning a non-factive action of supposition. The je word form is also used widely in a non-enclitic position, where it has a non-actual, primarily gnomic, present tense meaning.