Syntactic change in post-Classical Greek: a usage-based approach

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In course of my Undergraduate Studies and my MPhil I have developed a strong interest in issues of language change and, in particular, in variationist and usage-based approaches to grammar.While thinking of language systems and language change as dependent on actual usage is, of course, nothing particularly new and has attracted much interest in recent years and even decades - in particular in works of Adams, Dickey, Clackson, who concentrated on variation in Latin language - a disproportionately low number of researchers have committed themselves to the issues of syntactic variation or change, and even less in the context of Ancient Greek. Keeping that in mind I propose to research different syntactic features of Greek, paying attention to frequency of use and context.The point of departure of my analysis will be the published Papyri Corpora from Late Antiquity - a feat much simplified thanks to recent digitalisations accessible at PapyGreek, Papyri.info and Trismegistos - allowing us to access far better than literary texts the unmediated language of Ancient Greek speakers. For the same reason I intend to take into account Greek epigraphic data from Egypt, with their linguistically 'intersecting worlds' (W. Clarysse 2020), or contemporary metalinguistic commentary (e.g. Moeris). Based on such evidence, I will identify syntactic schemas and analyse their frequency in different contexts. One example that has sparked my interest, touched upon by K. Bentein (2015) or W. Clarysse (2010), are different ways of expressing purpose/goal - working on which, I will analyse the usage of such constructions as (system doesn't allow greek!) followed by different verb forms, or parataxis, to see their distribution within different contexts - both pragmatic (i.e. with the Lakoffian insight of sociolinguistics) and semantic (i.e. with the cognitive insight of 'syntaxsemantics continuum'). I will arrive thus at a comprehensive account of real-life usage of particular forms with regards to different pragmatic/semantic contexts. Moreover, my research will necessarily delve into later Greek texts, especially the early Christian writings (e.g. John Chrysostom, Ignatius), ideally tracing the development of particular features of syntax as used by different Greek-speaking societies throughout the first centuries of the Common Era, thinking about the plausible reasons for their entrenchment, thus giving my account a much-needed diachronic dimension.Finally, I intend to concentrate on issues of language contact - crucial in the Imperial Era corpora, where much change has been seen as Latin or Semitic in origin (as recently studied by e.g. V. Fendel (2022)). I will, thus, pay particular attention to plausible correspondences with Latin language, seeing which syntactic schemas might be understood as borrowed from/influenced by Latin, especially within the corpora of Latinized settlements (e.g. Mons Claudianus) and whether bilingual communities/writers might have detectably different preferences for usage of different forms and, if so, why that might be the case. Thus I hope ultimately to contribute to our understand of linguistic variation in the Classical World on three different levels - diastratic, diatopic and diachronic - finding out which forms become entrenched over time within which usage contexts, being a unique strength of corpus-based functionalist approach.