The Moods of Homeric Greek. By JO WILLMOTT. Cambridge Classical Studies.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 264.
Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978–0–521–87988–0.
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-Transliterated Greek has been set off within double asterisks
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CJ Online 2009.04.01
Latin has a sequence of tenses, Greek has a sequence of moods: so goes the
standard line. And Classical Attic is relatively well-behaved in using
subjunctives after non-past main verbs, optatives after past-tense
ones—with the proviso that an author could always choose in the latter
instance to use the “vivid” subjunctive, whatever that is supposed to
mean. This distribution, together with the use of main-clause subjunctives
in exhortations and prohibitions (over which the speaker has some control)
and that of optatives in wishes (over which the speaker has little
control), led scholars to posit that the two moods act in parallel, and
that they exist, together with the indicative, on an irrealis continuum:
with the indicative, the speaker asserts the reality of the event, with the
subjunctive that assertion becomes an expression of will, with the optative
one of mere wish. There were also morphological grounds for this schema:
the subjunctive has primary endings, the optative secondary endings,
calling to mind the pairing in English of will : would, can : could, and
may : might, in which the past tense of the modal verb is more irrealis
than the present.
Nor is this irrealis continuum the only major theoretical categorization of
relevance to the Greek moods. Perpendicular to it runs a division of moods
and modal verbs into deontic and epistemic modality. As the names suggest,
the former covers the use of the moods to indicate obligation, necessity
and will (prohibitive and jussive subjunctives, the optative of wish),
while the latter encompasses modal uses in which the focus is more on the
speaker’s uncertain knowledge of the truth of the statement (potential
optatives, and, in Homer, the subjunctive used as a future). Again,
objective morphosyntactic facts seem to corroborate this division: as
Chantraine pointed out, deontic modals generally lack the modal particle
**a)/n** / **ke** and are negated with **mê/**, whereas the epistemic
modals have the modal particle and are negated with **ou)**. As a whole,
the description appears to hold fairly well for Attic. But what about
Homeric Greek? The central argument of W.’s book is that it does not.
Instead, W. offers a problematized account of the Homeric moods, in which
these neat structuralist divisions are called into question and replaced
with a more complicated network of usages she sees as ultimately derived
from earlier Ur-meanings through grammaticalization. (For the uninitiated,
grammaticalization is the process whereby words of semantic weight, like
English will, gradually become bleached of semantic content and, frequently
shortened to clitics—’ll—and affixes, come to serve as markers of
grammatical features like tense or mood.) Because of the tenacity with
which W. argues against received opinion, the book will no doubt become
essential reading for those interested in the Greek moods. But it should
not be taken as the last word on the subject: not all the problems W. sees
in the standard view are of equal weight, and, more importantly, as W.
would herself agree, this is simply too vast a topic to be given definitive
treatment in 200-odd pages.
After two chapters covering the theoretical background in good detail (pp.
1–36), W. begins the body of the work with a chapter on the indicative
(pp. 37–52), setting the base-line for the examination of the subjunctive
and optative, which are her central focus. W. argues against the position
that the indicative is either (a) particularly realis or (b) epistemically
neutral, suggesting instead that it signals a “positive epistemic
stance.” In contesting position (a), she follows F.R. Palmer’s line
that the ability of indicatives to collocate with adverbs like possibly
shows that they are not realis forms; but neither does she agree with
Palmer that they are epistemically neutral, pointing to the incompatibility
of the indicative with modifiers like doubtfully. In W.’s view, the
reformulation of the indicative as a marker of positive epistemic stance
also explains the most modally troubling uses of the indicative, in
counterfactuals. But difficulties remain. First, it is unclear exactly how
“positive epistemic stance” and “realis” differ as descriptions of
the indicative. W. has already pointed out (p. 14) that the term realis
refers not so much to objective reality as to the speaker’s presentation
of the proposition. Clear examples of clauses that would be realis but do
not have positive epistemic stance, and vice versa, would have been welcome
to elucidate the distinction W. is attempting to make. Presumably we are
meant to believe that Tom is possibly singing would be an indicative that
shows positive epistemic stance but not realis modality. But if the
presence of possibly is enough to prove false the interpretation of the
indicative as realis, is it not also enough to refute the positive
epistemic stance reading as well? Second, the counterfactuals are still
awkward: just as with a description of the indicative as realis, it remains
problematic to argue that a counterfactual indicative in an apodosis
represents a more positive epistemic stance than does the potential
optative of the future less vivid.
Chapter 4, on the subjunctive, is the longest in the book (pp. 53–112)
and is divided into three main sections dealing with the chief uses of the
mood: the epistemic (Monro’s quasi-future subjunctive), the hortative and
the negative directive. In the first, W. examines the difference between
the future indicative and subjunctive as markers of future events. There is
much overlap between the two, as is only to be expected given the similar
situation with future markers in modern languages, e.g. English will and
going to. On the basis of such pairings as **ou)d’ e)/ssetai ou)de\
ge/nêtai** (Od. 16.437), W. does not believe that the future signals more
certainty about the upcoming event than the subjunctive does. Instead, as
the chief difference between the two, she points to the strong preference
for the subjunctive over the future in conditional and temporal clauses
referring to the future. W. convincingly ascribes this distribution to the
fact that the future is a younger marker than the subjunctive. Assuming, as
seems safe, that the Indo-European subjunctive was a future marker before
the sigmatic futures seen in Greek arose, we can see in the Homeric
situation the expected distribution of the older marker in more modal
contexts, the younger one restricted (in subordinate clauses) to resumptive
conditionals and indirect questions. This pattern has a parallel in
Spanish, where the older synthetic future has more modal uses than the
younger periphrastic forms. As for W.’s study of the negative directives,
her chief point is the refinement of what might be called the
Meid–Hoffmann model, which distinguishes between one form (in Greek, the
present imperative) as prohibitive—don’t do this thing you’re already
doing!—and another (here, the aorist subjunctive) as preventive—don’t
start doing this thing you’re not doing yet! [[1]] To this, W. adds the
idea of control: with present-imperative prohibitives, it lies in the power
of the addressee to stop the action in question, whereas such action lies
outside the addressee’s control in the aorist-subjunctive preventives.
Readers may not agree with all W.’s examples—the three passages with
**nemesa/ô** on pp. 102–3 suggest, as she apparently admits, that the
chief determining factor is temporal—but control remains a useful
parameter to keep in mind when examining negative directives.
This is a concept W. returns to in her next chapter, on the optative (pp.
113–52), where she concludes, inter alia, that the difference between
optatives of wish and imperatives is not that the former are weaker than
the latter, but that they lack the element of control on the speaker’s
part. More problematic is the material in the first half of the chapter,
where W., eager to confound the notion that the optative is a less realis
version of the subjunctive, suggests that it should instead be portrayed as
indicating a negative epistemic stance and thus forms a closer pair with
the indicative. This position is supported largely by W.’s analysis of
conditionals, in which she argues that the optative in protases and
apodoses is not always a remote possibility, but rather presents events as
unreal. Apart from the fact that it is unclear how this description is to
be distinguished from the standard position that the optative is the most
irrealis mood (is W. really correct in saying on p. 122 that it is “just
coincidental that ‘unreal’ events will often be ones with a smaller
likelihood of happening than real ones”?), W.’s interpretations of the
conditionals are themselves subject to question: she holds that the
optative does not in fact occur in particularly remote conditionals, yet in
her examples on pp. 116–23, she nearly invariably translates it with the
past-tense protasis and would apodosis that is, to my mind, precisely how
English indicates remote possibility (contrast the present-tense protasis
and will apodosis of “more vivid” conditionals). True, some of these
optative protases may be relatively likely to be fulfilled, but there might
be pragmatic reasons for presenting them as only remotely likely. [[2]]
Generally more satisfactory is Chapter 6, which treats the use of the moods
in purpose, iterative temporal and non-specific relative clauses (pp.
153–91). W.’s position that Homeric Greek has not yet reached as rigid
a sequence of moods as Classical Attic is a reasonable one, and,
considering the numerous exceptions that arise if one pretends that it has,
W. must be right to see the choice of the moods as determined through the
semantics of the subjunctive and optative independent of their relationship
to the main verb. The book concludes with a brief summary (pp. 192–8); a
justification of the decision not to treat the modal particle or choice of
negative as important (pp. 199–210; some may still want to defend
Chantraine’s position); a complete list of the lines of Homer that
exhibit the constructions she discusses (pp. 211–37); a very full
bibliography, especially rich in theoretical linguistic literature; and
indices of passages and topics covered. Overall, while readers may disagree
with W. on some points, they will no doubt be stimulated into reconsidering
exactly what the Homeric moods do: Attic this certainly is not.
COULTER H. GEORGE
University of Virginia
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[[1]] Those interested in the corresponding problems with negative
directives in Latin can now turn with profit to Chapter 4 of W.D.C. De
Melo, The Early Latin Verbal System: Archaic Forms in Plautus, Terence, and
Beyond (Oxford, 2007).
[[2]] For example, the optatives in Il. 5.273 that W. says refer to a
relatively likely event (p. 119) could be deliberate understatement (It’s
likely, but I’ll pretend it isn’t), perhaps out of a desire on
Diomedes’ part not to appear too cocky in going after horses that were
descended from those given by Zeus to Tros in exchange for Ganymede. Even
more to the point, the capturing of the horses is itself contingent
on—and thus more remote than—the successful killing of Pandarus and
Aeneas, an act marked as dependent on the fulfillment of a future more
vivid protasis (**ai)/ ken** … **o)re/xêi**) in lines 260–1. Here, at
least, the Homeric moods follow the Attic playbook.
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