DEN FJÄTTRADE PROMETHEUS. En stilometrisk studie av hyperbatakonstruktioner

Abstract

In this student thesis, the phenomenon of hyperbaton (Hb) is used as a stylometric device to contribute to the discussion about the authorship of Prometheus bound (Pr.). The phenomenon is analyzed in a quantitative way in the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank (AGDT), a corpus which allows for complex syntactic searches. Variables are defined, which have bearing on Hb in nominal phrases in Pr. where a noun has an attribute in the form of an adjective or another noun, and the same variables are then searched for in works of Aeschylus (A) and Sophocles (S), the remaining works in the AGDT corpus (Ö) being used as a control group. The number of occurrences is noted down, then converted into relative frequencies, in order for the works to be quantitatively comparable. The question to answer is whether there are stronger similarities in frequencies of the different constructions where Hb can occur between Pr. and A or between Pr. and S. Results show that nominal constructions where Hb is possible give proof of a stronger yet not unequivocal similarity between Pr. and A, the main difference between Aeschylus and Sophocles being that particles, especially δέ, tend to occur markedly less often in this position in works of Sophocles.