Που in Attic and Atticistic Prose: The Cases of Plato’s Republic and Lucian

In a previous paper, it has been argued that the particle που in Attic drama expressed an indirect personal evidential value, conflating assumption and inference, and served as a common ground manager to establish, restore, or maintain the common ground between speaker and addressee. In this paper, we test the findings of this earlier publication against two prose case studies in Attic(istic) language: Plato’s Republic and Lucian’s oeuvre. These tests allow us to check for genre-induced and diachronic differences in the uses of που, which we argue to exist, and to reconstruct the grammaticalization path of που. Additionally, we discuss the function of που from a cross-linguistic point of view, as well as the pragmatic differences between που and δήπου, comparing the dramatic evidence with Plato and Lucian.