Pragmatic Theorizing in, and Through, Modern Greek: A Roadmap of Past and Ongoing Research

Abstract

This paper aims to offer a state-of-the-art overview of the ways in which research on Modern Greek has informed—and been informed by—theorizing in the field of pragmatics. In charting this (rather uncharted) territory, our aim is to demonstrate that Modern Greek pragmatics does not only reflect the evolution of pragmatic enquiry from a narrow conceptualization to a much broader one that encompasses interactional, social and cultural specifications, but has also contributed new insights into pragmatic theory that surpass the purview of Modern Greek linguistics. While acknowledging that delimiting the remit of pragmatics is far from evident or even unanimously agreed, our overview envisages to provide the reader with a roadmap of past and ongoing research with a view to highlighting how general pragmatic principles interact with the language- and culture-specific parameters that are available to speakers of Modern Greek.

1. Introduction

Having emerged at the intersection of linguistics and philosophy, the field of pragmatics was initially—and rather famously—characterized as a “wastebasket” of linguistic enquiry (Bar-Hillel, 1971). This apt metaphor reflected an era that gave exclusive priority to formal approaches and left any context-dependent phenomena that appeared resistant to rigid formalization to the periphery. Still, in the years to come, what began as a more or less residual category matured into a sophisticated, multi-faceted discipline that seeks to systematically explain the relationship between linguistic forms and their users.

Within this frame, pragmatics was originally equated to the study of speaker meaning, with its aim being to work out how audiences infer the meaning that speakers intend to communicate over and above the linguistically encoded semantic content of their utterances. Here, the foundational contributions of Austin (1962) and especially Searle (1969) on speech act theory, alongside Grice’s (1975) theory of implicature, shifted scholarly interest from abstract logical structures to the intentionality of communicative acts. Despite being reworked in much of its detail, the underlying Gricean rationale was also adopted by more recent cognitive accounts, most notably Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995), which correspondingly envisaged the discipline as largely characterized by a search for universalist principles (or rather cognitive heuristics) which underpin verbal communication.

This long-standing tradition is of course still prominent in the field nowadays, but it has not remained unchallenged. Ever since the late twentieth century, there has been a concentrated call for a paradigm shift, with several scholars questioning the centrality of speaker intentions as the defining core of pragmatics and arguing instead for a view of communication as situated social and interactional achievement. Shifting the focus to meaning co-construction so construed, this perspective has specifically underlined the relevance of sociocultural considerations for pragmatic enquiry, suggesting that, while the cognitive capacities for inference might indeed be universal, pragmatic meaning is also largely shaped by language-specific structures and culture-specific norms. All in all, by testing established frameworks against non-English data, pragmatic research began to expose what would grow to be recognized as an Anglocentric bias in the field (e.g., Wierzbicka, 1991). As a result, research into different languages would no longer merely provide more data for existing theories; rather, it would call for a recalibration of the theories themselves (e.g., Spencer-Oatey, 2008).

Obviously, the tension between the so-called Anglo-American and Continental traditions—or between narrow and broad pragmatics, as we prefer to call them (for an overview, see Assimakopoulos, 2025, Section 2)—goes far beyond the aim of the present paper, which, as its title suggests, is to offer a state-of-the-art overview of pragmatic theorizing in, and through, Modern Greek. Still, it is essential for appreciating the landscape within which the literature that we review here was developed; after all, by situating the relevant scholarship within this broader divide, we can better understand how it has both adopted and adapted these global paradigms. So, our ensuing attempt to map some ways in which research on Modern Greek has informed pragmatic theory will follow the historical development of the field, with the relevant perspectives being treated in sequence. Despite appearances, however, this is mainly an expository move of convenience; while we adopt these perspectives’ distinctions as a useful heuristic for our present purposes, we must also recognize that the boundary between them is increasingly fluid in the contemporary theoretical landscape of the field.

Within the same spirit, it is also essential to note some further practical constraints that shaped the present overview. For one, it would have been virtually impossible, within the confines of a single paper, to present all the distinct theoretical backgrounds of the studies on Modern Greek that we survey. So, our discussion assumes the reader’s familiarity with mainstream theorizing in linguistics and especially pragmatics and proceeds without providing technical detail about the specific frameworks used in each case. Then, even though we cannot help but recognize the sheer breadth of research that can in principle (and often quite justifiably) be characterized as akin to pragmatics, space limitations forced us to concentrate exclusively on topics and phenomena that have traditionally been considered as more central to pragmatic theory. As a result, we had to also leave to the side a vast and productive body of work on Modern Greek that touches on pragmatics in applied settings, including in areas such as second language acquisition, clinical linguistics or translation studies, to name a few. For the very same reason, we have additionally excluded from our discussion research that falls more directly under the general rubric of discourse analysis, including its critical strand, even though, for this, we can refer the reader to the comprehensive overview offered in Perdicoyianni-Paleologou and Archakis (2024). Finally, in view of our specific focus on Modern Greek, we do not touch on several seminal contributions from world-leading scholars of Greek (or Cypriot) origin which have demonstrably shaped the global landscape of pragmatics, but have not been engaged with Modern Greek per se.1

2. Breaking Out of the Wastebasket: Narrow Pragmatics

While reference to pragmatics can be encountered in earlier research on Modern Greek too, the first explicit acknowledgement of what would eventually get to be recognized as a discipline in its own right is located in Kakouriotis (1979), and more specifically in his adoption of “the general thesis […] that syntactic phenomena have either semantic or pragmatic explanations” (p. 2). Obviously, this citation points to the already mentioned early linguistic thought, when pragmatics was not yet seen as an independent layer of analysis, but rather as a secondary explanatory tool to be invoked only when formal analyses reached their limits, largely a reflection of the prevailing generative paradigms of the 1970s. Yet, as Kakouriotis (1979) would aptly foresee, despite being “something that many students of linguistics would not accept” at the time, his general thesis would soon be recognized as “a sine qua non of a linguistic analysis” (p. 10). Indeed, as time went by, the once perceived as strict division of labor between the language-internal core of syntax and semantics and the extra-linguistic filter of pragmatics would be largely dismantled even within the narrow conception of the field of pragmatics, though its influence would persistently linger in the ways in which we categorize the so-called “linguistic interfaces.”

2.1. Modern Greek and the Syntax/Pragmatics Interface

The lingering influence of formalist thought is perhaps most evident when it comes to the syntax-pragmatics interface, where the “common view [is] that at least some type of contextual information is systematically integrated into syntactic structure” (Wiltschko, 2022, p. 273). Take, for instance, the traditional assignment of slots dedicated to information structure (e.g., FocP/TopP) when modelling sentences. On the one hand, it grants a pragmatic function a place in the grammar, but, on the other, it also glosses over the fluid and context-dependent nature of new and old information, essentially reducing them to “semantic properties of expressions that receive an interpretation by the relevant interface systems through the position they occupy in the narrow syntactic component” (Sifaki, 2013, p. 266).

As widely acknowledged, “Modern Greek is a discourse-configurational language” (Georgiafentis et al., 2025, p. 5). This alone should, in principle at least, invite more robust pragmatic explanations in the language’s formal description; yet, the details of such explanations are more often than not obscured in the relevant literature. For example, most work on Modern Greek’s flexible word order (e.g., Philippaki-Warburton, 1985; Kechagias, 2011; Haidou, 2012) or its complex system of clitics (e.g., Anagnostopoulou, 1994; Mavrogiorgos, 2010) may indeed recognize the relevance of pragmatics right from the start, but in essence uses the label “pragmatic” only to allude to interpretation effects at the discourse level that essentially fall outside its direct remit.2

Going through the relevant literature, however, one can also find notable exceptions to this trend. The earliest one we could locate was Tzanidaki (1996), who challenged the necessity of a hierarchical (configurational) syntax for Modern Greek altogether, advocating instead for a dependency-based, flat clause structure, where the various permutations of word order are not the result of movement to fixed syntactic slots for topic and focus, but derivative of a system governed by grammatical preference principles that are motivated by processing factors. Regardless of the details (or indeed the validity) of the resulting framework, on this occasion, the pragmatic story does not simply allude to some secondary layer of interpretation; rather, it is the primary driver for overriding the traditional approach. Even more pertinently to the present discussion, in providing her account, Tzanidaki directly draws on relevance theory, demonstrating how, by choosing a marked word order, speakers achieve specific pragmatic effects that compensate for the increased processing effort required to interpret their utterances.

In a comparable, more recent study, which resorts to neo-Gricean rather than post-Gricean pragmatics this time, Chiou and Huang (2010) propose a partial pragmatic account of NP-anaphora. On this occasion, the authors maintain the distributional restrictions that syntax, and more specifically Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1995), places on anaphoric expressions, but still show that these restrictions alone cannot adequately account for the full range of anaphoric patterns encountered in Modern Greek. To address this shortcoming, they develop a complementary account, whereby anaphora resolution is additionally governed by the interlocutors’ preferences, which are in turn regulated by Levinson’s (2000) interacting Q-(Quantity), I-(Informativeness), and M-(Manner) principles.

Even over and above research that explores the syntax/pragmatics interface in a more balanced way, however, there seem to be features of Modern Greek that directly call for more nuanced approaches, necessitating thus a pragmatic component. As Michelioudakis and Kapogianni (2013) demonstrate, for example, ethical datives constitute a special category of pronominals that require specific well-formedness, but have no effect on truth conditions and their contribution can only be resolved against their context of utterance. In (1), for example, the dative clitic mu, which can be removed without affecting the sentence’s grammaticality or truth-conditional interpretation, does not denote possession or an affected participant, but instead adds a subjective, evaluative stance (often ironic or mildly reproachful) towards the interlocutor’s expectation.

(1)	Mu	Itheles	ke	gamo	sta	geramata
	1SG.DAT.CL.	want.IMPF.PST.2SG	and	marriage	in-the	old-age
	‘You wanted to get married in your old age.’

Clearly, a grammaticalized form that is not fully encoded in either syntax or semantics and requires pragmatic inference on every occasion of use directly challenges the traditionally received view, indicating that the interaction between the syntactic and pragmatic domain may not be a linear hand-off, but a more complex, multi-directional filter.

All in all, the studies surveyed in this section showcase that Modern Greek has intrinsic characteristics which directly lend themselves to a pragmatic analysis; especially one that would quite naturally complement the robust syntactic scaffolding already accounted for in the relevant literature. Beyond this purely descriptive value, however, these studies can be seen to also provide empirical support for the hypothesis that pragmatic considerations and/or principles are not only useful for the interpretation of syntactic output, but may actively co-determine well-formedness.

2.2. Modern Greek and the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

Turning to the interface between semantics and pragmatics, the situation is admittedly more complex. For one, there is a strong sense in which most of the foregoing discussion on the syntax/pragmatics interface applies here too; after all, any effects that pragmatics can be assumed to have on syntax are ultimately meaning-driven.3 That being said, there is still a principled—albeit slightly artificial—way in which we can distinguish between pertinent research on the grammar of Modern Greek that is oriented more towards semantics rather than syntax. To wit, the studies discussed in the previous section can be taken to relate primarily to the ways in which meaning licenses certain syntactic configurations, while the ones we will zoom in on here concentrate more on the interpretation of specific linguistic forms.4 Then, regardless of the specific language one focuses on, any discussion of the semantics/pragmatics interface faces—pretty much by default—the challenging question of where linguistically encoded (i.e., semantic) meaning ends and contextually inferred (i.e., pragmatic) meaning begins. Obviously, in the context of linguistic description, the challenge is particularly acute, as one is called to decide whether a language’s expressive functions are part of semantic instructions encoded in its grammar or the result of pragmatic enrichment. Since the present overview is not the place to debate this age-old tension, the ensuing discussion will again concentrate on some major opportunities that have arisen, in the context of research on Modern Greek, to pursue pragmatic theorizing that further pushes the limits of the division of labor between grammar and use.

Unsurprisingly, the lingering effect of formalist thought is easy to spot here too. In the interest of keeping the “pragmatic wastebasket” as empty as possible, there has been a historical tendency to over-formalize, often packing context-dependent effects into the semantic representation of grammatical markers and categories. A prime example of this tendency can be encountered in the analysis of the Modern Greek subjunctive mood, which is realized by the preverbal particle na. As reviewed by Rouchota (1994), prior to her own account, the most promising description of the na-clause had been provided by Veloudis and Philippaki-Warburton (1983), who suggested that it serves to encode a number of distinct propositional attitudes. While this intuition appears to be correct, if given a purely semantic basis, it would effectively mean that the attitudes at hand are encoded in the particle itself, which would in turn be rendered multiply ambiguous. Once we take into account the sheer number of (often even contradictory) attitudes that can be attributed to the different uses of the subjunctive in Modern Greek, however, this approach becomes counterproductive. The solution that Rouchota proposes is to assign a univocal semantics to the particle na and shift the burden of dealing with its diverse interpretations onto pragmatic enrichment mechanisms. What allows her to pursue this approach, which has notably inspired considerable corresponding work in other languages too, is the conceptual toolkit offered by Relevance Theory. So, by suggesting that the subjunctive encodes a simple procedural semantics—that is, an instruction indicating that the proposition expressed within the na-clause is to be entertained as a description of a state of affairs in a possible (rather than the actual) world, the responsibility for identifying the particular attitude at hand falls on pragmatic inference and the dedicated heuristic that is guided by the search for relevance.

A similar deflationary rationale, grounded in neo-Gricean pragmatics this time, can be found in a series of publications by Chiou (culminating in Chiou, 2017) which deal with the Modern Greek marker tha, typically combined with the perfective non-past to express the future. In addressing the interpretive complexity of the relevant tha-clauses—in particular the tension between their future and epistemic present interpretations, previous accounts either approached tha as an altogether autonomous category that transcends the limits of tense and modality (i.e., a “future gram-type” à la Tsangalidis, 1999) or posited a pure epistemic modal operator semantics, whose readings are compositionally determined in combination with the accompanying tense (e.g., Giannakidou & Mari, 2018). Building up on this latter proposal, and noting its inability to explain on its own how a modal semantic base gains a future prediction reading in actual communication, Chiou suggests an approach that treats this reading as a generalized conversational implicature, that is, a “presumptive meaning” generated by Levinson’s (2000) I-principle. Under this view, the hearer pragmatically amplifies a minimal modal signal into a stereotypical prediction of reality and the interpretive burden of futurity is shifted from the grammatical form to the inferential labor of the interpreter.

Beyond these particle-based accounts, a broader pragmatic justification for unburdening the grammar from interpretive nuances can also be located in Kitis and Tsangalidis’ (2005) treatment of the Modern Greek tense-aspect system. Zooming in on the imperfective past, and more specifically on sentences that—at face value at least—constitute grammatical violations, the authors argue for a multi-layered linguistic model that separates the referential from the expressive level. Consider, for example, the sentence in (2), which is acceptable because of a deliberate suspension of the compositional tense-aspect interpretation that allows the speaker to foreground an evaluative stance while neutralizing temporal and event-specific distinctions.

(2)	Kapote	otan	mia	kivernisi		afxane	tous	forus,
	once	when	a	government		increase.IMPF.PST.3SG	the	taxes
	to	ekane	gia	to	kalo	ton	politon
	it	do.IMPF.PST.3SG	for	the	good	of-the	citizens
	‘Once, when a government was raising taxes, it did so for the citizens’ good.’

In suggesting their alternative account, Kitis and Tsangalidis reinterpret the relevant semantic clashes as pragmatic options, whereby speakers choose an unexpected tense-aspect configuration to signal a stance towards what is said.

While on the temporal domain, an independent case which underlines the necessity of pragmatic enrichment can be found in Tsimpli’s (2000) classic analysis of Modern Greek gerunds (V-ondas forms). Identifying these forms as morphologically and syntactically underspecified for tense and aspect, Tsimpli suggests that, rather than encoding a specific temporal relationship (such as simultaneity or anteriority) within its verb base, the gerund’s temporal interpretation relies on pragmatic conditions on plausibility. Much like in the previous cases, in this picture too, the grammatical form provides a minimal scaffold that the hearer must enrich by drawing on the aspectual properties of the matrix verb and the broader discourse context.

Ultimately, the studies reviewed in this section demonstrate how research in Modern Greek has provided reasons to reassess the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics against the rigidity imposed by traditional formalist accounts. By shifting interpretive nuances into the realm of pragmatics, they demonstrate how even core grammatical categories can function as scaffolds for contextual meaning, turning what have been customarily thought of as stable semantic properties into triggers for productive pragmatic enrichment. At that, by shifting the interpretive burden from rigid semantic representations to more flexible pragmatic mechanisms, these approaches do not just simplify the grammar; they offer a more realistic account of how Greek speakers navigate the gap between the literal and the intended.

2.3. Modern Greek and Pragmatics “Proper”

Whereas syntax and semantics can at least attempt a description of a language’s internal core, there are still phenomena that remain unintelligible without a dedicated pragmatic layer of analysis. Let us not forget that pragmatics’ original ascent into the mainstream was precisely due to the recognition of its necessity for the explanation of such categories as illocutionary force, deixis, presupposition and implicature. So, in concluding our examination of the influence of Modern Greek on pragmatic theorizing within the traditional, narrow conceptualization of the field, we cannot but turn to research that specifically zooms in on these categories.

For one, Modern Greek has served as a productive testing ground for highly influential experimental research into the cognitive processing of universal pragmatic mechanisms, particularly in relation to scalar implicatures (e.g., Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; Breheny et al., 2006). But even beyond such universalist applications, research centered on Modern Greek has contributed to the study of such core categories as deixis and illocutionary force. Regarding the former, Bella (2001, 2005) provides a comprehensive cognitive-pragmatic account of Greek deictics, such as edho/eki (‘here/there’), aftos/ekinos (‘this/that’), etc., which reinterprets the notions of proximity and distance as markers of cognitive and communicative salience, revealing deictic choice’s status as a dynamic tool for signaling importance within the immediate discourse ground. Similarly, within the domain of illocutionary force, Vassilaki (2006) offers a substantive analysis of directive speech acts in Modern Greek, contributing a refined theoretical framework for their categorization. Rather than treating them as a monolithic group à la Searle, she proposes a continuum based on the degree of optionality regarding the hearer’s compliance, which allows for a more granular mapping of the ways in which Greek grammatical forms can be taken to encode social and interpersonal variables.

On top of this broad engagement with such core pragmatic categories, however, a review of the relevant literature reveals that the most prolific and concentrated body of research on Modern Greek within the narrow pragmatic vein revolves around the description of discourse markers and pragmatic particles. Even though these two labels are often used interchangeably in the literature, strictly speaking, they refer to different types of expressions.5 As Fraser (1999) elucidates, discourse markers are “expressions drawn from the syntactic classes of conjunctions, adverbials, and prepositional phrases” that typically “signal a relationship between the segment they introduce, S2, and the prior segment, S1” (p. 950). By comparison, pragmatic particles, which correspondingly lack referential meaning, “signal the speaker’s epistemic and/or affective stance toward the addressee(s), the content of talk, or other aspects of the speech context” (Cook, 1999, p. 181). Despite their differences, both these categories are usually approached using similar analytical concepts within the field of pragmatics, so we will address them in tandem, insofar as they both function as conventionalized instructions for contextual interpretation rather than carriers of referential/conceptual meaning.

In the earliest account of such Modern Greek expressions that we located, Pavlidou (1991) rehabilitates a set of these “little words,” as she calls them, from their traditional classification as mere “hesitation adverbs” (Triandaphyllidis, 1978). Through a systematic investigation of both the distribution and interpretation of the adverbs arage (‘I wonder’), dithen (‘so-called’), isos (‘perhaps’), pithano(n) (‘probably’) and taha (‘as if’), and the conjunctions mi/mipos (kai) (‘by any chance’), she demonstrates that these expressions are in fact highly heterogeneous and exhibit varied pragmatic functions that their indiscriminate categorization largely obscures. If anything, this study provided evidence for the need to incorporate the pragmatic level in linguistic theory, rendering Pavlidou one of the first scholars internationally to explicitly call for multidimensional frameworks that capture the dynamic interplay between the layers of syntax, semantics and pragmatics in language.

Adopting a similar multidimensional perspective, Archakis (2001) offers a detailed investigation of four more Modern Greek discourse markers, namely diladi (‘that is to say’), i malon (‘or rather’), m’ ala loja (‘in other words’) and thelo na po (‘I wish to say’), showcasing how their description and different functions can all be subsumed under the category of reflexive talk. A central aspect of his analysis is that it questions the adequacy of a purely pragmatic approach, which would approach these expressions as either discourse coherence markers (à la Schiffrin, 1987) or procedural encodings (à la Blakemore, 1987), showcasing the usefulness of grammaticalization theory (Hopper & Traugott, 1993) in explaining their functional distribution.

Despite Archakis’ reservations about the adequacy of the relevance-theoretic conceptual/procedural distinction for explaining the expressions in focus in this section, there is by now a substantial body of research on Modern Greek that does exactly that. An early attempt that stands out in this vein is the one by Ifantidou (2001), who famously applied the distinction to the study of evidentiality in general. As part of her highly influential treatise on this topic, she also focused on data from Modern Greek, and more specifically the already mentioned particle taha. In Ifantidou’s account, taha is a marker of interpretive (attributive) use, and as such encodes procedural meaning prompting the hearer to treat its accompanying assertion as evidentially weak. It is then on this evidential basis that taha’s often derived hearsay interpretation is worked out inferentially as a result of the hearer’s automatic search for relevance.

A more recent concentrated attempt to employ the conceptual/procedural distinction on Modern Greek can be found in Bardzokas’ work on causality. Building upon previous work by Kalokerinos (2004) and Kitis (2006), Bardzokas (2012) dispels the common assumption that the two prototypical Modern Greek causal connectives, yiati and epeidi (≈‘because’), are interchangeable and explains their distinction by placing them on different points of the conceptual/procedural continuum.6 Apart from refining his original account in subsequent work, Bardzokas’ extensive investigation of causality in Modern Greek has also sought to inform Relevance Theory, contributing novel theoretical possibilities, such as the postulation of poly-procedural meaning in Bardzokas (2019b) or that of syntactic constraints on relevance in Bardzokas (2021).

In a correspondingly bold move, further research on Modern Greek has extended the re-evaluation of encoded lexical meaning in procedural terms even to the domain of basic logical connectives. In their comparative analysis of the Greek and French conjunctions kai and et (‘and’), Assimakopoulos et al. (2022) challenge the traditional equation of the semantics of natural language conjunction with the logical operator &, arguing instead for a procedural account. Based on the particularities presented in Canakis’ (1995) exhaustive account of the uses of kai, and comparing them with the ones of its French counterpart, the authors suggest that rather than simply joining two propositions, natural language conjunction also acts as a marker that prompts the hearer to process the two conjuncts as a single premise for the derivation of cognitive effects.

Taken together, the studies presented in this section illustrate how research on Modern Greek has provided a rigorous empirical basis for testing and refining pragmatic theory. By pushing the agenda of descriptive adequacy, these studies have not only rescued diverse pragmatic particles from the periphery of traditional grammar, but have also offered nuanced accounts that extend the theoretical remit of central frameworks of pragmatics, like Relevance Theory. In doing so, they additionally demonstrate that the pragmatic level is an indispensable component of linguistic analysis, providing necessary evidence for evaluating the postulation and universality of core pragmatic categories.

3. Doing Away with the Interfaces: Constructionist Approaches

While the studies reviewed so far have demonstrated the necessity of pragmatics as an essential domain interacting with syntax and semantics, Construction Grammar (Fillmore et al., 1988; Goldberg, 2006) offers an even more radical departure from the modular tradition, by doing away with the notion of interfaces altogether. Advancing a usage-based model of linguistic analysis, it posits constructions—that is, conventionalized pairings of form and meaning that “integrate information at all levels” (Marmaridou, 2013, p. 91)—as the fundamental units of linguistic knowledge. Crucially, on the assumption that many linguistic patterns carry conventional pragmatic specifications that cannot be reduced to compositional semantics or to conversational inference alone, the ‘meaning’ component of constructions encompasses not only semantic content but also pragmatic nuances—specifically, meanings that are conventionally tied to particular linguistic forms rather than relying purely on context. In view of its direct relevance to the ongoing discussion and the sizeable body of research that has utilized this framework to analyze Modern Greek data, it would be useful to zoom in on some key studies within its remit too.

To begin with, Marmaridou’s research on Greek lexical semantics illuminates the connection between lexical meaning and constructional pragmatics. For instance, in her analysis of psyche (‘soul’) (Marmaridou, 2010), she demonstrates that the term’s polysemy emerges from an interplay between cognitive mechanisms (such as conceptual metaphors and image schemas), cultural models (particularly, the Greek conception of the self), and constructional patterns. At that, the word psyche appears frequently in collocations and idioms, which both motivate and constrain constructional meaning. In effect, Marmaridou’s analysis argues against a fixed borderline between lexical and constructional meaning, supporting a view of the lexicon-grammar continuum that has direct implications for how pragmatic meaning should be integrated into the analysis of polysemy and semantic change.

Furthermore, developing a pragmatic, constructionally motivated account of seemingly semantic phenomena, Marmaridou (2012) provides an in-depth analysis of Modern Greek nominal constructions containing the indefinite determiners enas/mia/ena (‘a(n)’). Marmaridou treats indefinite nominal expressions as a family of constructions, including the Indefinite Generic Construction, the Indefinite Proper Noun Construction, the Indefinite Predicate Nominal Construction, and the Proverbial Indefinite Construction, all being associated with specific pragmatic and discoursal features as well as with expressivity. She thus argues that the interpretation of such forms is best explained in terms of their constructional roles in usage patterns in discourse, illustrating how determiners in Modern Greek can behave in unforeseen ways beyond what semantic theory predicts.7

Construction Grammar also provides an appropriate framework for integrating discourse-pragmatic conventions into grammatical theory and semantic analysis. A case in point is that of Greek conditionals in which the future tense is optional or variable; the so-called “future-marked conditionals”. Drawing on naturally occurring spoken and written data, Nikiforidou and Torres Cacoullos (2010) demonstrate that discourse factors such as topic, continuity, and perspective shape the choice of tense alongside grammatical constraints. An integrated, constructionally motivated account concerns also the semantics-pragmatics of the deictic motion verb erxome (‘come’). On the basis of corpus data, Antonopoulou and Nikiforidou (2002) reveal that erxome is positively marked for speaker/addressee involvement and in this sense it is more deictic or deictically anchored than pijeno (‘go’). Thus, perspective-taking is shown to be encoded in discourse, with the semantics of the deictic motion verb erxome interacting with discoursal and textual factors that are commonly treated separately in the literature in terms of either lexical semantics or discourse analysis.

The integration of pragmatic meaning within constructional descriptions is perhaps best exemplified through research on Modern Greek dialogic constructions that illustrates how illocutionary force, which, as we have already seen, traditionally belongs to the purview of pragmatics proper, can also be captured in constructional terms. Nikiforidou et al. (2014), for example, examine ela, the second person singular imperative of erxome (‘come’), demonstrating that its conversational meanings constitute a family of related constructions. In turn-initial position, ela serves to challenge a preceding utterance, with variations in the type of challenge being systematically conditioned by the following word, the speech act force and sentence type of the preceding utterance, and prosodic cues. In this picture, each meaning is modeled as a conceptual gestalt of formal (including prosodic) and semantic-pragmatic properties; a constructional representation that integrates form, meaning, and contextual specifications at once.

Finally, by integrating pragmatic specifications within linguistic description, the constructionist approach provides tools for analyzing even phenomena that pertain to multimodal discourse. Very recent work by Geka and Piata (2026b), which analyzes the internet meme as estelne(s) (‘you or s/he should have texted’) in monomodal and multimodal X (formerly Twitter) data over a seven-year period, offers insights that corroborate the need for Multimodal Construction Grammar. In constructionist terms, memes can be approached as semiotically parsimonious templates for language use, with their visuals constituting constructional slots, much in the spirit of what applies in purely linguistic (monomodal) constructions (Dancygier & Vandelanotte, 2017). The proposed analysis argues that as estelne(s) qualifies as such a multimodal form-meaning pairing whose meaning is grounded in the polysemy of the modal particle ας/as, which, combined with the unboundedness of the Imperfective Past, motivates (latent) conditionality, wish, counterfactuality, and ultimately a reprimand for the unfulfillable. What is more, this pre-existing constructional template behind as estelne(s) licenses an affective meaning (in the form of stance-taking) that further serves as an instigator of linguistic creativity and ultimately guides affective communication; a perspective that becomes even more compelling when multimodality is brought into the picture (Geka & Piata, 2026a).

As evidenced by the discussion in this section, research on Modern Greek has not only contributed language-specific empirical case studies but, perhaps more importantly, has offered a fertile ground for testing the applicability of constructionist approaches in a language other than English, positioning them, in this way, as productive frameworks for pragmatic analysis. Such research has come to demonstrate that at least some of the variation inherent in discourse is amenable to grammatical description and that an utterance’s prosodic contour or the semiotic resources employed for its expression may (or perhaps should) be part of this description. While being in tune with ongoing advancements in the field, this line of research offers promising possibilities for future research to further explore the integration of discourse-level properties into the architecture of Modern Greek grammar.

4. Embracing Interaction and Culture: Towards Broad Pragmatics

The constructionist approach successfully illustrates how pragmatic nuances are conventionalized within the linguistic system, but it still largely focuses on the structural representation of language. As we have already seen right from the very beginning of this paper, the contemporary conception of pragmatics looks beyond the internal mechanics of the language, embracing communication as situated social and interactional achievement. From this perspective, the focus shifts from how meaning is encoded or interpreted to how it is co-constructed through interpersonal negotiations filtered by sociocultural norms.

Since the relevant scholarship that also touches on Modern Greek has been particularly influential and prolific, we cannot afford to exclude it from the present overview. In order to keep the discussion succinct, however, we will specifically focus on two main areas of interest: politeness and humor. This choice is not arbitrary; both these areas represent quintessential social practices through which Greek speakers navigate interpersonal relationships and manage face-work, so they can allow us to appreciate how the universal cognitive capacities for inference are channeled through interactional strategies and culture-specific scripts. Before we turn to them, however, a short detour to the field of conversation analysis is also warranted.

4.1. Modern Greek and Conversation Analysis

The shift in focus from narrow to broad pragmatics has also been characterized by a significant methodological shift. While most of the research reviewed in the previous sections (and especially Section 2) relied on linguistic intuition, the broad tradition favors data-driven approaches, with a marked preference for real-life data as they emerge in authentic recordings of talk-in-interaction. As a result, the presentation of examples in contemporary pragmatic theorizing increasingly adopts the conventions of conversation-analytic transcription. Crucially though, this engagement with conversation analysis extends beyond mere notational accuracy, with studies adopting this perspective having also fundamentally contributed to the contemporary shape of pragmatic theory, by providing rigorous analyses of social actions and the ways in which interpersonal relationships are systematically managed through the fine-grained machinery of interaction.

Research on Modern Greek has also taken advantage of the precision afforded by the conversation analytic paradigm to uncover the dynamics of local communicative practices. For a comprehensive overview of earlier research in this area we refer the reader to the comprehensive review provided in Terkourafi et al. (2010, Section 4). At the same time, it is essential to recognize that conversation analytic research on Modern Greek does not only provide a high-fidelity record of talk-in-interaction but also offers significant insights that can refine pragmatic theory, especially in relation to the sequential and collaborative nature of meaning construction. In order to see how it does so, we will now zoom in on some more recent studies in the field.

Pavlidou’s (2012) study of the first-person plural subject pronoun emeis (‘we’), for example, illustrates how a conversation analytic approach can uncover pragmatic functions that remain invisible to traditional grammatical intuition. In a null-subject language like Modern Greek, the use of a subject pronoun is often labeled as merely emphatic; yet, Pavlidou demonstrates how emeis performs more than collective self-reference so construed. By analyzing naturally occurring data, she reveals that the pronoun can also be used to organize the information structure of the utterance, clarify the precise membership of the collective group, and index the speaker’s stance—often signaling a sense of detachment or distancing. In this way, she captures the non-referential meaning of emeis, showing how even core grammatical categories, like person reference, transcend their traditional referential scope to negotiate complex social identities in interaction.

Turning to Makri-Tsilipakou (2020), we find an analysis of the secondary interjection kale, derived from kalos (‘good’), which reveals its utility not only as an organizational marker but also as an informal pragmatic particle that indexes discord, and thus manages social actions like disagreement or disapproval. Similar insights regarding address forms in Modern Greek can be found in Karachaliou (2018), which showcases how vocative particles, such as re, and address terms, such as file (‘friend’), function as positioning tools within conversational narratives. As Karachaliou reveals these markers do not merely reflect existing relationships, but actively construct narrative and interactional identities by signaling the speaker’s stance towards both the story characters and their immediate audience. Much like before, such findings contribute to pragmatic theorizing by illustrating how particles can be used to navigate the complex tension between structural cooperation (alignment) and emotional support (affiliation), providing the necessary empirical depth in accounts of social relationship negotiations.

Finally, the theoretical potential of the conversation analytic approach is perhaps most clearly visible in recent work on the multifunctional particle ba, typically used in Modern Greek to mark surprise or counter-expectation. Both Katsiveli (2020) and Alvanoudi (2022) have recently investigated this particle using conversation-analytic tools, offering distinct, yet complementary, insights into how it can inform wider pragmatic theory. On the one hand, Katsiveli positions it within the realm of epistemics, suggesting that it serves as a mechanism for managing unexpectedness and repair. On the other hand, Alvanoudi approaches it as a mirative strategy and demonstrates how its use as a change-of-state token can mitigate disaffiliative actions and align with broader cultural norms of politeness.

All in all, the studies presented in this section illustrate how the lens of conversation analysis can identify fine-grained functional differences that might otherwise be overlooked. By grounding categories such as mirativity, epistemic stance, and social affiliation in the sequential flow of Modern Greek talk-in-interaction, this body of work moves beyond mere description; it offers a productive site for observing how these theoretically defined mechanisms are actually deployed and negotiated in practice. Even so, the transformative contribution of studies on Modern Greek to pragmatic theory is most evident in the domain of linguistic politeness, which over the past decades has arguably been the most productive hotspot of pragmatic research locally.

4.2. Modern Greek and Politeness

Broadly speaking, research on politeness has engaged with three major theoretical orientations (for an overview, see Sifianou, 2010): the foundational framework established by Brown and Levinson (1987); cognitively oriented, frame-based models (e.g., Terkourafi, 2005); and the discursive and relational approaches characteristic of the ‘second wave’ of politeness research (e.g., Watts, 2003). The trajectory of work on Greek politeness mirrors these global developments, gradually shifting the focus from politeness as a theoretical construct to lay people’s understandings of im/politeness as they emerge in everyday interactions. In doing so, it has contributed valuable insights to politeness theory while also illuminating the sociocultural specificities of Greek communicative practices.

Sifianou and Antonopoulou (2005) offer a detailed and thorough review of early scholarly work in Modern Greek, mainly affiliated with Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, covering various types of speech acts (including requests, approbation, thanks and apologies) and activity types (such as announcements on board, service encounters, panel discussions, and classroom interaction). While we refer our reader to this overview for more detail, we cannot help but include in this one at least the seminal study that defined the parameters within which subsequent research in the area has largely operated; that is, Sifianou (1992a). Also rooted in Brown and Levinson’s face-saving model, this work went far beyond mere application; by comparing Greek and English, Sifianou highlighted cultural divergences in face management and demonstrated that the very notion of politeness is construed differently in each setting. Identifying the understanding of politeness as broader in Greece and narrower in England, Sifianou argued that neither culture should be considered more polite than the other; rather, they differ in the culturally embedded strategies they prioritize. Further, drawing on data from drama, questionnaires, and personal observation, she found that the Greek culture is oriented towards positive politeness with strategies that affirm common ground, solidarity, and in-group relations, whereas English speakers favor negative politeness, which emphasizes deference, autonomy, and minimization (or avoidance) of imposition. This positive politeness orientation in Greek is evidenced through the extensive use of in-group markers, directness and, in general, linguistic devices that include the addressee in the activity.8 To provide an example, focusing on requests—a speech act that inherently poses a threat on the negative face of the addressee—Sifianou showed that the conventionalized request patterns in Modern Greek include present indicative constructions, as in (3), and imperatives, as in (4), in contrast to English which disprefers directness and favors instead the use of modals and hedges, as in (5).

(3)	Mu	dinis	ton	anaptira	sou
	1SG.DAT.	give.2SG.PRS	DEF.	lighter	2SG.GEN.
	‘You give me your lighter?’

(4)	Dose	mu	ton	anaptira	sou
	2SG.IMP.	1SG.DAT.	DEF.	lighter	2SG.GEN.
	‘Give me your lighter.’

(5)	Could/May I have your light, please?

In line with the general ethos of the Greek society, which fosters directness and solidarity, Sifianou (1992b) also showed that Modern Greek exhibits greater productivity in the formation of diminutives, which have higher frequency of occurrence here. While prototypically they indicate smallness, diminutives are routinely used to express endearment and affection, thus serving to mitigate the face threat involved in requests, offers, and compliments. According to Sifianou, however, diminutives in Modern Greek—as well as the related lexical item ligo (‘a little’)—do not serve to minimize imposition (as originally assumed in Brown and Levinson’s model) but are primarily aimed to establish (or reaffirm) solidarity among the interlocutors.

While Sifianou’s foundational investigations identified the positive politeness orientation of the Greek-speaking world, Terkourafi’s subsequent work offered a robust theoretical framework that helped enhance even further our understanding of Greek politeness. Although this framework was primarily developed and tested using data from Cypriot Greek, its findings are indispensable for the broader Greek context, as they can also provide a systematic explanation for why the direct forms identified by Sifianou are perceived as polite rather than intrusive.

Terkourafi’s approach draws on cognitive linguistics (particularly the notion of frames) and neo-Gricean pragmatics (assuming default meanings in the form of presumptive inferences) to revisit the relationship between linguistic usage and politeness considerations. With a particular focus on offers and requests, Terkourafi’s (2001) analysis of spontaneous conversational data demonstrates that, in Cypriot Greek, direct forms—far from being inherently impolite as the face-saving model would predict—function as polite or politic behavior in contexts where they are conventionally expected, because they fit cultural frames of solidarity. Variables like age, sex, and setting are found to co-occur with formulaic expressions (such as imperative requests), thus challenging Brown and Levinson’s universal formula for computing face threat and the generic preference for indirectness (see also Terkourafi, 2005). Such extra-linguistic features jointly constitute a “minimal context” which serves to license “presumptive inferences regarding the polite import of particular linguistic expressions” (Terkourafi, 2001, p. 210). This finding supports the view that politeness cannot be assessed on the basis of linguistic forms alone, such as imperatives. Conventionalized expressions whose polite force obtains via presumptive inferences tied to specific contextual frames constitute so-called “unmarked politeness”, that is, politeness that passes largely unnoticed in everyday interaction.9

In all, the frame-based approach assumes that politeness is the unmarked way of speaking in a community. Essentially then, one could argue that Terkourafi provides the cognitive machinery to explain Sifianou’s observations: directness in Greek “works” because it fits into established cultural frames of solidarity. Within this picture, Terkourafi (2001) treats formulaicity as an integral part of polite discourse and critiques the first-wave universality that inheres in Brown and Levinson’s face-saving model of politeness. In this respect, her account shifts towards second-wave discursive approaches, viewing politeness as relational work emergent from interactional norms. Indeed, building up on the first wave of politeness studies, the second one shifts toward discursive, emic (lay) perspectives, emphasizing politeness as an evaluative, context-dependent social practice rather than a fixed set of strategies. Relational work, proposed by Locher and Watts (2005), extends this perspective by viewing politeness, impoliteness and rudeness as part of broader interpersonal negotiations of norms and identities, whereby behaviors are construed relationally rather than in isolation.

In this theoretical landscape, the assumption that Greeks form part of a uniformly positive politeness culture was challenged, with research revealing significant intralinguistic as well as intergenerational variation. For instance, Bella’s (2009) analysis of invitations and invitation refusals demonstrated that age functions as a determining factor for both the format of the speech event and the politeness devices used for its realization. In this context, younger speakers tend to conceptualize invitations as face-enhancing acts and commonly prefer positive politeness strategies, while older speakers treat invitations as potentially face-threatening and favor negative politeness strategies. Effectively, evidence challenging the characterization of the Greek culture as a positive politeness one, valuing involvement and solidarity, comes from an intergenerational perspective on Greek conceptualizations of im/politeness. Specifically, a more recent study by Bella and Ogiermann (2019) reveals an increasing emphasis among younger generations on values of personal space, autonomy, and non-interference, suggesting that Greek society may be currently undergoing a shift towards individualism and negative politeness.

The picture is further blurred in Bella and Sifianou’s (2012) study of email requests in academic contexts. Greek students’ email requests to faculty members attest to high levels of formality and extensive use of negative politeness strategies that stand in stark contrast to the positive politeness orientation typically attributed to the Greek culture. These findings suggest that Greek politeness norms are more context-sensitive than previously suggested, with formal institutional contexts eliciting linguistic patterns more similar to those found in negative politeness cultures.10 The domain of academic discourse thus provides evidence for understanding how the situational context is involved in shaping face management. Additional evidence for this comes from the analysis of Greek offers. Bella (2019) compares the politeness strategies used in offers directed at friends and in offers issued by students to professors. Her analysis, which combines data from role plays, retrospective interviews and a naturally occurring interaction, illustrates that offers vary significantly depending on the relationship between the interlocutors, with offers in asymmetrical situations (i.e., student to professor) favoring a preference for negative politeness.

Another productive strand of pragmatic inquiry within the second wave of politeness research pertains to people’s lay understanding of im/politeness. Sifianou and Tzanne (2010), for example, examine how Greek speakers conceptualize politeness and impoliteness, both construed as broad phenomena that operate primarily at a societal level and involve verbal and/or non-verbal means of expression. Based on questionnaire data, they show that for Greek speakers both politeness and impoliteness hinge on particular social norms according to which the level of appropriateness is assessed in a given context. As they go on to argue, this explains why conceptualizations of im/politeness have significantly changed over time. Interestingly, this study also reveals that, for Greek informants, impoliteness is seen as different in nature from, though not the polar opposite of, politeness. The conceptualization of the two phenomena differs also in that Greek speakers perceive politeness as primarily non-verbal while impoliteness is predominantly viewed in terms of verbal action.11

Finally, Tzanne and Sifianou’s (2019) analysis of meta-discourses about impoliteness in Greek online newspaper articles and comments found therein has shed additional light on how lay understandings function at the societal level. Drawing on van Dijk (1998), this research demonstrates how evaluations of im/politeness intersect with identity construction and ideological positioning. More specifically, the analysis of metapragmatic comments regarding rudeness in public spaces identifies a pole of binary identities; the “impolite citizen” (characterized by verbal aggression like shouting or interrupting, and behaviors like littering or pushing) versus the “polite citizen” (who is civil, educated, and victimized). Within the same spirit, Tzanne’s (2019, 2022) work on Greek digital communication has productively employed the concept of relational work, which, as we have seen, positions politeness as a discursive concept whose boundaries are negotiated by participants rather than determined by analysts. Analyzing the comment sections of food blogs, Tzanne elucidates how Greek participants orient to positive politeness through praise, emphasis on common background knowledge, and informal endearing terms, constructing identities that reflect the importance of in-group membership in Greek culture.

As Sifianou and Antonopoulou (2005, p. 263) admitted in their own overview of politeness research twenty years ago, “[w]riting on politeness is a difficult task not because of scarcity of sources but, on the contrary, because of the plethora of the available publications”. This claim is even more pertinent nowadays, as the study of politeness has grown into an even more robust and flourishing part of the Modern Greek pragmatics research agenda. It would not be an exaggeration to say that research on Modern Greek politeness has shaped politeness theory by challenging early universalist models and advancing more discursively oriented and culturally grounded approaches. The breadth of this research, as also evidenced in the overview offered above, has highlighted the cultural variability that inheres in facework, reframing politeness as relational, dynamic and culturally embedded.

Zooming in further on this latter perspective, which has characterized the turn to broad pragmatics, we will conclude our survey by turning to another area of pragmatic inquiry with prolific research on Modern Greek. As we will now see, this research correspondingly illustrates how humor is systematically deployed to manage social boundaries and perform identities, offering additional insight into the domain of broad pragmatics.

4.3. Modern Greek and Humor

Given the breadth of the research, comprising also discourse-analytic and sociolinguistic perspectives, that has been conducted on Greek humor, in this short section, we will restrict ourselves to a selection of studies pertaining to humor theory, which showcase the increasing appeal of sociopragmatics in the field. The dominant theoretical framework in linguistic humor studies has been the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), introduced by Raskin (1985) and further developed by Attardo and Raskin (1991). This framework identifies script opposition as the essential mechanism underlying humorous texts and has provided powerful tools for humor research.

Using Modern Greek data, Tsakona (2004) has applied and extended the GTVH to the analysis of canned jokes while emphasizing the discourse and sociocultural dimensions of humor. More specifically, Tsakona examined the structural and semantic organization of jokes as a text type, analyzing how incongruity is linguistically constructed and resolved. Her research challenged the commonly held assumption that humor resides solely in the punchline, and demonstrated that canned jokes more often than not contain humorous elements (so-called “jab lines”) that appear prior to the punchline. Thus, jab lines contribute to the overall humorous message without diminishing the surprise effect ensuing from the punchline.

More importantly, in subsequent work, Tsakona (2009) proposed a refinement of the GTVH to account for the particularities of multimodal humor as well as the contextual and sociocultural factors involved in humorous interpretation. Focusing on Greek newspaper political cartoons, she examined how humor is generated through the interaction of both verbal and visual elements. This study’s contribution lies in showing that the logical mechanisms identified in verbal jokes (such as exaggeration, contradiction and metaphor) function in an analogous fashion in the visual mode, too. This entails a modification—or expansion, for that matter—in the Language knowledge resource of the humorous text in order to encompass non-verbal, semiotic modes alongside verbal ones.

More recently, Tsakona (2020) has proposed a whole new theoretical model for analysing humor in discourse. In her Discourse Theory of Humor, as she calls it, Tsakona positions humor as emerging not from linguistic structures alone but from the interaction of textual features with various contextual parameters, including sociopragmatic assumptions (e.g., metapragmatic stereotypes), genre expectations, and semantic, stylistic and visual elements and other semiotic cues. Effectively, these three Analytical Foci are aimed to replace the knowledge resources that have long been assumed within GTVH, in a line of thinking that instigates a novel account also in terms of critical literacy and humor pedagogy. Tsakona’s approach treats humor as fundamentally discourse-situated, attending to the variety of humorous genres and to the range of sociopragmatic functions humor serves, most notably with respect to shaping in-group and out-group relations.

Consider, for instance, the case of humor in parliamentary discourse. Research (Tsakona, 2009; Archakis & Tsakona, 2011) has shown that parliamentary humor—with punning being the hallmark of it—functions as a means of damaging the opponents’ public image; yet, without the repercussions that apply when institutional norms of behavior are violated. The sociopragmatic perspective weaves humor research with identity construction, thus rendering yet another productive research strand. Archakis and Tsakona (2005), for example, extended the GTVH framework by demonstrating how the knowledge resource related to the humorous Target can be exploited for identity work in conversational humor among Greek speakers. This approach treats humor as a versatile discourse strategy for constructing social identities through the promotion of shared values and the demarcation of group boundaries (see also Archakis & Tsakona, 2006).

A sociopragmatic rationale can also be found in research that shows humor as being deeply entwined with other forms of figurative language, such as metaphor. In her analysis of humorous metaphors in election campaign advertising, for example, Piata (2016) demonstrates that metaphor and humor converge vis-à-vis their evaluative function in discourse. For metaphor, this is achieved through its framing effect. At the same time, humor commonly serves as a playful, witty means of criticism, targeting specific individuals or social groups. This analysis entails that the affinity between metaphor and humor may be pragmatic rather than grounded in the semantic duality that both phenomena share conceptually in bringing together two domains (or scripts) of a different kind.

In short, the studies sketched in this section have aimed to yield a comprehensive picture of humor studies in Modern Greek, whereby the empirical richness of Greek data—from jokes to parliamentary debates—has revealed the cultural grounding as well as the contextual specificity of humor. Perhaps more importantly, this strand of research has yielded important insights into the theoretical foundations of humor studies, mainly by moving from a text-centered, structural orientation to a more nuanced treatment of context and interaction, expanding also to multimodal discourse. In this vein, this research has reinforced the view that humorous interaction is a primary site for the negotiation of relational boundaries and identity construction, including the formation of in-group solidarity and out-group differentiation.

5. Conclusions

Far from being exhaustive, the present paper has aimed to offer an overview of pragmatic inquiry in, and through, Modern Greek with the hope that it will serve as a roadmap for the interested reader. Admittedly, documenting the full range and breadth of research on Modern Greek pragmatics would be utterly impossible. With this in mind, our account has aimed to showcase how pragmatic research in Modern Greek mirrors the paradigm shift from (a) language-internal properties to sociopragmatic realities and (b) a set of allegedly universal, culture-general principles—in the form of conversational maxims, interpretative heuristics, speech acts, and politeness strategies—to situated acts of communication construed as social, interactional achievement. In situating the relevant scholarship within this broader divide, we have sought to demonstrate how the study of Modern Greek functions as a critical empirical site for pragmatic theorizing. By providing data that challenges the boundaries of universalist approaches, it has offered a rigorous testing ground for pragmatic theory, ensuring that our understanding of verbal communication remains refined against the reality of linguistic practice.

Future research may likely engage with areas of inquiry that are currently witnessing a nascent interest. For instance, as we have already seen, although productively researched from a discourse-analytic angle, Greek multimodal discourse and digital communication have only recently begun to be explored through the lens of pragmatics. Similarly, research on Modern Greek dialects may have traditionally prioritized formal features or sociolinguistic variables, but the field appears to be currently expanding to include more dedicated pragmatic perspectives. It is only recently that research on Modern Greek dialects and linguistic theory has begun to address the pragmatic functions of markers within dialectal varieties. Building on such developments, future inquiry could provide valuable insights regarding, for instance, evidential markers, the pragmatic nuances of dialectal tense-aspect systems, or socially and culturally embedded discursive practices, including politeness phenomena. All in all, it is hoped that, by charting the (rather uncharted) territory of Modern Greek pragmatics, the present work will also serve as a springboard for more research in the future, addressing not only age-old issues in pragmatics in light of Modern Greek data but also language- and culture-specific phenomena pertinent to the speakers of the language themselves.