Abstract
When a language, connected to a given speech community, is considered as a historical object, its use, as E. Coseriu claims, varies in relation to a set of dimensions. Such variation occurs in time, space, in communicative settings and according to the speaker’s social status. In this article, instances of these phenomena are analyzed in Ancient Greek from the Mycenaean age to the Roman period.
Structuralist emphasis on the constant and unchanging aspects of language systems was overcome by Eugenio Coseriu’s t…