Metro e confini di parola: il caso dei preverbi multipli in Omero

In this paper, I analyze the Homeric passages that attest to composites containing multiple preverbs from a metrical, philological, and linguistic standpoint. My working hypothesis is that a number of composites handed down by the tradition in fact rely on a non-univerbated sequence. The analysis allowed achieving a twofold goal. First, it shows that, in about half of the relevant passages, composites occur in correspondence with a metrical pause that virtually separates preverbs from the verbal stem that they modify. Second, it points out that the metrical analysis must be supported by linguistic evidence: the regularization of metrical pauses in fixed positions is still an ongoing process in Homeric Greek. Moreover, the positioning of pauses, used to assume word-boundaries, has been detected based on word-boundaries. Lastly, what counts as a word has not always been consistently defined from a linguistic standpoint by those who studied the Homeric hexameter.