The impact of insubordination on the history of Greek

In this paper, I trace the impact of insubordination and semi-insubordination on the history of Greek, focusing on its impact on the modal system used to express speech acts. Starting from the cross-linguistic connections of insubordinate and semi-insubordinate ἵνα and να constructions with those found in other languages, I show that ἵνα only had subordinate usages in Classical Greek (including in dyadic syntactic contexts), but developed insubordinate usages for directive and wish speech acts in Post-Classical Greek. In Medieval Greek, insubordinate να spreads pragmatically to other speech acts, e.g. to exclamatives, interrogatives and various assertives (e.g. counterfactual apodoses or double negative declaratives). In Modern Greek, insubordinate να has obtained novel usages in interrogative speech acts too and gained paradigmatic strength as it competes with the imperative and the future. Semi-insubordinate patterns are first developed in Medieval Greek (with ἴσως νὰ + main verb) but spread formally and functionally to other parts of the modal system, expressing epistemic possibility, probability, counterfactuality and avertives.