"The most immediately obvious difference between Greek and English syntax is free word order, and phrasal discontinuity is the starkest manifestation of free word order. What sort of syntactic typology, one wonders, could license sentences like A red he bought shirt and A shirt he bought red, and what semantic or pragmatic meanings do such word orders convey?".

"Offering an original new theory to explain the phenomenon, Discontinuous Syntax applies some of these recent ideas in a detailed analysis of phrasal discontinuity as it appears at different stages in the history of ancient Greek. It goes well beyond its immediate topic in leading to a deeper understanding of the basic character of Greek syntax, as well as providing the non-specialist with a handy Greek-oriented introduction to some essential tools of linguistic analysis."--BOOK JACKET.