On the Location of Ancient Greek Stress and its Relation to Accent

ABRITTA, ALEJANDRO

Burdeos

Congreso; 14e Congrès de la FIEC; 2014

Université de Bordeaux - FIEC

The purpose of my dissertation is to present a comparison between three different proposals to locate Ancient Greek stress: the classic one of Sydney Allen (1973), who proposes a set of rules independent of accent, the one based on quantity and rhythm of Devine and Stephens (1994) and the one of A. P. David (2006), who makes it depend contextually on the tonal accent. The comparison is based in a quantitative analysis of the position of trochaic ending words in Ancient Greek hexameter, since this is almost the only kind of words where the mentioned theories predict different stress locations. The main hypothesis is that, if a statistically significant difference in the distribution of the trochaic ending words with different accentuation could be found, this would amount to a corroboration of David?s position. The first corpus to analyze is the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and from the results obtained on it the research expands to other texts.   Allen, W. S. (1973), Accent and Rhythm, Cambridge: University Press. David, A. P. (2006), The Dance of the Muses. Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics. Oxford: University Press. Devine, A. M. and Stephens, Laurence D. (1994), The Prosody of Greek Speech. New York and Oxford: University Press.