The System of Negative Concord in Postclassical Greek: Evidence from Documentary Papyri

The morphosyntactic expression of negation in Greek has been the object of renewed interest over the last few years, because of the theoretical relevance and the diachronic significance of the data from this language. Several studies have highlighted the necessity of an improved understanding of the Postclassical Greek language stage, in order to reconstruct the historical processes leading to the shift from a non-strict to a strict negative concord system. It has been pointed out that the change is already completed in Medieval Greek, but we know little about its development. The non-strict system of Classical Greek seems to be substantially preserved in Biblical and New Testament Greek, although changes in the distribution start to appear. This paper contributes to filling the gap related to the study of the system of negative concord in Postclassical Greek addressing data from documentary papyri of the Roman period (1st–2nd centuries CE). The paper combines a quantitative and qualitative analysis approach, considering all the occurrences of the lemma οὐδείς (‘no one’) in a corpus of documentary papyri and discussing them by means of examples.