Historical Sociolinguistics: How and Why? Some Observations from Greek Documentary Papyri

Abstract

Whereas initially texts from the past were given relatively little attention in sociolinguistic studies, nowadays historical sociolinguistics as a discipline has come to maturity, too. A central notion in (historical) sociolinguistics is that of context: regrettably, however, there is still no generally accepted theory of how context can be captured and related to language. One of the few frameworks that has attempted to provide a coherent and unifying account is the so-called Functional Sociolinguistic framework. In this article, I illustrate the potential of this model for the study of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek complementation.