The priming act in Homeric epic

Homeric epic today takes the form of a written text, but that text reflects a performance; it represents a discourse created in an exchange between performer and audience. 1 The success of this epic exchange depends on the efficient production and reception of a complex narrative composed in rich language. It is also predicated on the ability of the performer and the audience to navigate a large storyworld populated with numerous characters. This paper explores the use of fixed linguistic constructions in narrative that facilitate the cognitive process of moving from character to character and from scene to scene in Homeric epic. The corpus of Homeric epic lends itself particularly well to a study of this phenomenon for two reasons. First, ancient Greek linguistically encodes the articulation of discourse into small steps more clearly than most western languages. Second, the Homeric corpus was composed and received in performance. The cognitive pressure involved in this process has made the discourse strongly formulaic, on a metrical, discursive, and structural level. I first present an analysis of so-called left-dislocation in Homeric Greek from a discourse perspective, with specific attention to short discourse units consisting only of a pronoun/name + particle, which I dub "priming acts." The second part of the paper analyzes two recurrent complex constructions containing priming acts that serve specific functions of (re) establishing contextual frames or accommodating a change of viewpoint. The complex constructions demonstrate the usefulness of priming acts in navigating a vast story world.