Echoic interrogatives in Aristophanes from a syntactic perspective

Abstract

Echo questions or echoics are utterances that represent a prior linguistic or contextual stimulus in the discourse (broadly understood). Their study as a category has been dealt with in different languages, but not generally in Ancient Greek. In this language, echoics present as a fundamental characteristic the alternation between the interrogative paradigms of τίς and ὅστις. In this paper we characterise the echo questions in the corpus of Aristophanes' comedies, classifying them based on their syntactic structure and relating their interpretation to the general postulates of echoic interrogatives in other languages. Several previously undescribed sequences are thus catalogued here. Finally, it is argued that the occurrence of ὅστις in Greek echoics corresponds to a syntactic mark related to the interpretative meaning of these sequences, which finds correlates in other languages such as Spanish.