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Documentary texts are vital to our understanding of many aspects of the ancient world, such as its administration, education, and economy. The value of these texts goes even further however: being autographs, they directly testify to ancient communication practices, a field of study which so far has remained underexplored. In this volume, specialists in the field engage with a broad range of documentary sources. They discuss not only how various modes of communication, such as language, handwriting, and lay-out, are employed in specific contexts of writing, but also how these different modes are interrelated. Building on insights from contemporary social-semiotic theory, the volume makes a case for the establishment of historical social semiotics as a discipline.

In this collective volume edited by Klaas Bentein, Mark Janse, and Jorie Soltic, some of the leading experts in the field explore variation and change in one of the core areas of Ancient Greek grammar: tense, aspect, and modality. The contributors investigate key aspects such as the existence of and competition between linguistic variants, the value of modern linguistic theory for the study of linguistic variation, and the interplay between various dimensions of variation. They focus on various stages of the Greek language (Archaic, Classical, Post-classical, and Byzantine), taking both qualitative and quantitative approaches. By doing so, they offer valuable insights in the multi-faced nature of the Greek verbal system, providing an incentive towards the further study of linguistic variation and change.

Ancient Greek is commonly considered a'synthetic'or'inflectional'language, that is, a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. Nevertheless, already at the earliest stages of the language one finds traces of multi-word'periphrastic'constructions similar to those in the modern European languages, as in ἦν γινόµεν α,'it was happening', or ἔχει ἀτιµά•sας,'he has dishonoured'. Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek offers a systematic investigation of periphrastic constructions with the verbs'to be'and'to have'based on an extensive corpus of texts, ranging from the eighth century BC to the eighth century AD. It clarifies the notions of'verbal periphrasis'and'adjectival periphrasis'from a theoretical point of view, and offers a broad introduction to a selection of recent advancements in linguistics. It includes a diachronic analysis which investigates constructions in all three main aspectual domains-perfect aspect, imperfective aspect, and perfective aspect-combining a qualitative with a quantitative approach. In doing so, the volume presents a substantial contribution to our understanding of the ancient Greek verbal system and its development over time.