Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is a language which abounds in discourse particles showing a wide range of functions. This paper aims at analyzing the semantic differences between the most frequent adversative particles in Greek: allá , kaítoi , méntoi and mé:n . Drawing on a number of functionally and cognitively-oriented theoretical approaches to pragmatics, I will argue that these particles can best be analyzed as polysemous networks of semantic extensions resulting from the semanticization of contextually evo