Syntactic Markedness and Stylistic Refinement: ‘Proleptic’ and ‘Resultative’ in Ancient Greek

Research on resultative secondary predications (such as She brought him up an honest man) has so far focused on modern languages. Although the availability of this construction type in ancient Greek has occasionally been questioned, no specific investigation has been devoted to the topic yet. On the basis of literary evidence, this paper argues that resultative secondary predications were not alien to ancient Greek and that they are subsumed under the ‘proleptic’ use of adjectives described in traditional historical grammars. The productivity of this construction type is essentially confined to poetry, especially tragedy, where it is distinctive of a highly elaborated style and spreads across specific thematic areas. Poetry offers fertile ground for the actualization of a potentiality on the margins of the language system, thus enhancing the linguistic repertoire of ancient Greek.