Negative concord in Postclassical Greek: impact and functions of formulaic expressions in documentary papyri

This paper deals with Ancient Greek and investigates the functions and role of formulaic expressions involving the occurrence of one or more negative indefinites and/or a negative marker, offering methodological insights into the analysis of language change in historical corpus data. The analysis combines quantitative and qualitative approaches and is based on a corpus of documentary papyri of the early Roman period (i.e., 1st–2nd centuries CE). Due to the high number of occurrences of oudeís (‘no one’) found in formulaic multi-word sequences in the corpus, the paper discusses the methodological choices adopted to minimize the impact of such occurrences on diachronic analyses based on quantitative data. In addition, the paper illustrates the formulaic expressions identified in the corpus, together with an overview of the discourse types in which they occur. Finally, it explores the behaviour and role of these formulaic multi-word sequences and offers a discussion of their sequential placement.