PLUPERFECT PERIPHRASES IN MEDIEVAL GREEK: A PERSPECTIVE ON THE COLLABORATION BETWEEN LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY By THANASIS GIANNARIS University of Athens ABSTRACT This article focuses on the history of the Medieval Greek ‘BE + aorist participle’ periphrastic construction with the aim of contributing to the understanding of its development and arguing in favour of a particular methodological perspective for historical linguistics. Specifically, by exploring the diachrony of this verbal construction, which has been neglected in historical accounts of Greek, I propose that an adequate explanation for all its properties will require us to supplement our theoretically informed linguistic approach with parameters pertaining to the textual nature of the historical data. My conclusion will emphasize the necessity of a close collaboration between linguistics and philology. 1. INTRODUCTION The Greek perfect and its diachronic mutations have been a very attractive area for both philologists and modern linguists. Since Chantraine’s (1927) inspiring study, aspects of the history of the category perfect in Greek have been eagerly explored and have been of significant value in the understanding of crucial issues in the historical linguistics research agenda (e.g. Moser 1988 on grammaticalization, Haug 2008 on factors driving semantic change, or Drinka 2003 on areal ⁄ contact linguistics). However, there remain parts of its history that are until now either under-studied or unclarified, and their exploration may prove to be very fruitful from a methodological point of view. In my contribution I focus on a virtually unstudied Medieval Greek periphrastic construction. According to my analysis, this form was used for a specific time period as the most grammaticalised exponent of the perfect. In sections 2 and 3 I touch upon the synchronic and diachronic properties of that particular construction and discuss its connections to the history of the category perfect in Post-classical Greek. In section 4, I argue that some of the peculiarities of the periphrasis are the expected outcome of a grammaticalization process initiated in Classical Greek. However, the adoption of that stance, which capitalizes on the systematic dimension of a dead language but leaves out its textual nature, fails to illuminate important diachronic problems and hence does not provide a thorough historical account. In order to obtain a fuller explanation, we need to go back to texts and inspect closely all the information that the textual language can offer. In the conclusion, it will become clear that the collaboration between linguistics and philology is a sine qua non of the historical linguistic studies. Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 109:3 (2011) 232–245 Ó The author 2011. Transactions of the Philological Society Ó The Philological Society 2011. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.