The homeric augment a deictic particle /

by Pagniello, Frederick James

Within Homeric Greek is attested the augment, e-, that is prefixed to preterits of the verbal system. Scholarship has long accepted the view of this particle as the marker of past-time whose appearance is solely governed by the needs of the meter; hence, the absence of the augment marks unaugmented preterits as metrical variants, but functional equivalent with the augmented preterits. The recent scholarship by Bakker has suggested that the Homeric augment is actually a deictic particle. Although limited to character speeches and gnomic periods (i.e., statements of general truths), his study suggests that the appearance of augmented preterits correlates with the degree of deixis associated within the narrative environment. The purpose of this study is to examine the thesis of the deictic augment within the context of the entire corpus of Homer. We will show that the appearance of the Homeric augment is essentially a deictic particle. This will show that the Vedic injunctive (formally an unaugmented preterit) does not exist within Homeric Greek, and that it is furthermore an innovation concomitant with the reanalysis of the augment into a temporal marker. This will furthermore show that the thesis of the deictic augment provides a better account for the various traces of the particle, the protoaugment, that are attested outside of the verbal system within various Indo-European languages, thus pointing to the proto-augment having existed within Proto-Indo- European.