This work originated in a team project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through an Emmy-Noether program. The idea of a five-year collaboration—modeled after normal practice in academic fields other than the Humanities—and the generosity of the grant enabled us to become an internationally active group. The biggest thanks is therefore for the Humanities section of the DFG board committee, for selecting the proposal, funding it, and granting us an extension of six months.

Equally important was the availability of the Classics department of the University of Heidelberg to host us throughout these years; warm thanks in particular to Jonas Grethlein for accepting us with enthusiasm.

Early on, the Center for Hellenic Studies expressed interest in publishing the results of the project. Our greatest gratitude goes to Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, Gregory Nagy, and Lenny Muellner, for their excitement, endorsement, and thoughtful assistance, and to Noel Spencer for his tireless work on the online publication.

We are highly indebted to Eugenia Lao for taking up the demanding task of reading and copyediting volumes I to IV. Her feedback has been crucial at various stages, and helped us to considerably improve the texts on different levels.

During these years we had the extraordinary opportunity to get in contact with a large number of colleagues in different places. Let us thank first our closest colleagues, working at or visiting the Classics department of the University of Heidelberg, in particular Emily Baragwanath, Andrew Faulkner, Bill Furley, Luuk Huitink, Larry Kim, Pietro Liuzzo, Andreas Schwab, Aldo Tagliabue, Athanassios Vergados, and Katrin Winter. They closely followed the developments of the project and gave us invaluable suggestions. Thanks also to Beatrix Busse (English department, Heidelberg), for her engagement with the topics of our project, and for her personal support.

In Heidelberg we hosted three international workshops: Vividness Through Variety: Narrative Discontinuities in Herodotus and Thucydides (November 2011); The Story Teller’s Path: Particles and Discourse Organization in Homer and Pindar (May 2012); and Word Play: Ancient Greek Drama and the Role of Particles (November 2012). The stimulating contributions of all the participants guided our research path. We also invited individual scholars to give lectures and/or to converse on topics related to our project: Egbert Bakker, Jerker Blomqvist, Jenny Strauss Clay, Coulter George, David Goldstein, Elizabeth Koier, André Lardinois, Lars Nordgren, Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas and Mihailo Antović, David Sasseville, and Marina Sbisá. It was a great pleasure to learn from them.

A further pleasure was to travel and to meet colleagues across countries. We are particularly grateful to Pietro Liuzzo and Roberto Batisti for inviting us to come to Bologna and organizing a study day on Ancient Greek Particles Across Genres. We also thank the audiences of the presentations we delivered at Moscow State University, Roma Tre University, the University of California (Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara), the University of Heidelberg, and the University of Lausanne. Likewise we thank the audiences of our papers presented at the following conferences: Ancient Greek and Semantic Theory (Nijmegen), the Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of Canada (Winnipeg), the Arbeitstagung zur Gesprächsforschung (Mannheim), the Celtic Conference in Classics (Bordeaux), the Classical Association Annual Conference (Durham, Exeter, Reading), The Classical Association of the Middle West and South Annual Meeting (Baton Rouge), the Cognition and Poetics Conference (Osnabrück), the conference Discourse Markers in Corpus Languages (Vitoria-Gasteiz), the conference “God is in the details.” A reflection on methodology in the humanities (Milan), the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Newcastle upon Tyne), the International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (Ghent), the International Pragmatics Association Conference (Manchester, New Delhi, Antwerp), the conference The Language of Persuasion (London), the conference Linguistics and Classical Languages (Rome), the OIKOS International PhD Days (Ravenstein), the OIKOS conference Textual Cohesion (Katwijk), the conference Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science (Freiburg), the Poetics and Linguistics Association Conference (Heidelberg), the conference Syntactic change and syntactic reconstruction: New perspectives (Zürich), and the conference Textual strategies in Greek and Latin war narrative (Amsterdam). Further scholars to whom we are thankful for their insights include John Du Bois, Heinrich Hettrich, Elizabeth Minchin, Peter Pickering, Geoffrey Raymond, Giovanni Rossi, Alessandro Vatri, and Andreas Willi. We profited from their expertise as well as from the productive exchanges we had with them.

Last but not least, we thank all the colleagues who replied to the Denniston questionnaire that we distributed at an early stage of the project. Their reactions provided important starting points for us to think about the shape and the contents of this monograph.

For administrative, computer-, and library-related help at the Classics department of the University of Heidelberg we express deep gratitude to Nina Bungarten, Elisabeth Fleischmann, Sabine Hug, Klaus-Dieter Knöss, Miriam Mosig, Claudia Nissle, Martin Räuchle, and Franz Martin Scherer.

Finally, several people supported us on the personal level, in various periods of the project, if not continuously. Anna thanks Tommaso, Filippo, and Rita, for being infinitely patient. Annemieke thanks Markus, as well as all her friends and family members, in particular her parents and brother, for their encouragement and warm presence. Mark thanks Arie and Sonja, Sanne, little Jonne—who was born just as the project started—and most of all Nina.

September 2015