The augment in Homeric past tenses is an optional feature.
In this thesis, I study the coexistence of augmented and unaugmented verbs in Homer, offering an overview and a discussion of the literature on the topic, and suggest a new approach to the phenomenon from a syntactic and textual perspective.
The aim of this work is to describe, on a synchronic level, some of the distributional tendencies of the augment and to explore if these tendencies are related to its diachronic reconstruction as a temporal marker.
Having first considered the phenomenon within a Comparative Philology framework, I then highlight the distribution of augmented and unaugmented verbs in Homer through a detailed investigation of scholarship on this matter. I then give an account of the different opinions on the reconstruction of the original function and morphology of the augment, also underlining how Homeric data can contribute to this general debate. The comparison and discussion of the various proposals suggest that the more reliable theory is the reconstruction of the augment as a temporal marker.
In the second part of the thesis, I present a personal analysis of a corpus of four books from the Iliad. The textual analysis of the data shows that the presence or absence of the augment is often related to narrative effects or strategies. Syntactic analysis, carried out within a Generative Grammar framework, then explores whether augmented and unaugmented verbs have different syntactic behaviour. Results from this investigation illustrate that the syntactic distribution of augmented and unaugmented verbs constistently match with certain narrative effects. In the conclusion, having presented the time related information given by tenses as a complex structure, I try to discuss how the augment in Homer can be considered a temporal marker and I explore whether tendencies which have emerged from my analysis can be related to this interpretation
