Acknowledgments
The research collected in this monograph was kickstarted by the PhD-by-publication which I have written at Ghent University between October 2019 and December 2022, Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek: Pragmatics, Life Cycles and Connected Pathways. The project was first funded by the Ghent Special Research Fund and subsequently by a fundamental research grant from the Flemish government (FWO 1122620N, 2019–2023). The majority of this monograph was written during the fourth year of my PhD and part of the first year of my post-doctoral fellowship at Ghent, funded by the Flemish government (FWO 12B4B24N, 2023–2026). I also benefited greatly from the opportunity to write in the tranquil environment of the Fondation Hardt in Geneva in the spring of 2024 and finalise the manuscript in the collegial environment of the Classics department of the University of Groningen.
This monograph and the research contained in it could not have been produced, had it not been for the many people that have shaped me academically in the last years. First of all, I would like to express my heart-felt thanks to the supervisors and advisors of my PhD project who have helped me unpack the intricacies of counterfactuals in the past years: my PhD supervisors Rutger Allan and Klaas Bentein, the members of my advisory committee Geoffrey Horrocks, Mark Janse, Antonio Revuelta Puigdollers and Gerry Wakker, as well as the members of my doctoral committee James Clackson, Koen De Temmerman, Toon Van Hal and Gerry Wakker. Especially as a postdoc, it is a real pleasure to be able to rely on their mentorship in navigating academic life. Second, I am greatly indebted to the members of the international research projects that I have been a part of in recent years; I wish to thank the members of the Pragmatics in Cyclical language Change project and Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (PI) for rich discussions of cyclicity and all things related, the members of the Habituals typology project and Kees Hengeveld (PI) for the friendly typological discussions of tense, aspect and modality, and the members of the Everyday Writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt (EVWRIT) project and Klaas Bentein (PI) for countless insights into the language of the Post-Classical Greek papyri. Third, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Jean-Christophe Verstraete for inviting me to be a substitute lecturer for his classes on linguistic typology at the KU Leuven. The opportunity to dive deeper into one of my linguistic passions, together with other typologists at Leuven and an enthusiastic group of students, has truly expanded my academic thinking. Fourth and finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Brian Joseph for suggesting that I submit my monograph to the Brill series Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory and for his encouraging support as editor. This series acts as a platform for typological studies (e.g. Aikhenvald & Dixon 2011, Santazilia 2023), diachronic studies (e.g. Labeau 2022) and studies of underrepresented (diachronic) varieties of Greek (e.g. Ralli 2019). In this monograph, I weave together these three research areas.
Last but most certainly not least, I want to recognise the unfailing support of my families, friends and, above all, Lydia, my bride-to-be. Your firm foundation is my sine qua non.