THE STORY OF PU.

I happened across Nick Nicholas's thesis while looking for something else; its title is "The story of pu: The grammaticalisation in space and time of a Modern Greek complementiser," and it has five summaries ranging in length from "I am spending three years looking at the 1000-year history of one word in Mediaeval Greek" to the actual abstract:

This work is concerned with tracing the historical development of the various functions of the Modern Greek connective pu. This connective has a considerable range of functions, and there have been attempts in the literature to group together these functions in a synchronically valid framework. It is my contention that the most illuminating way of regarding the functional diffusion of pu — and of any content word — is by looking, not only at one synchronic distribution (that of Standard Modern Greek), but at the full range of synchronic distributions in the sundry diatopic variants (dialects) of Modern Greek, and that such a discussion must be informed by the diachrony of the form...

An insistence on diachrony is sweet music to this Indo-Europeanist manqué. (The page I've linked is HTML, but the chapters linked from it are pdf files.)

Posted by languagehat at September 19, 2005 11:59 PM