Ancient Greek: characteristics of verbs following imperative particles

This readme file was made by Joppe Baert, Ruben Spits and Alexander Delanote on the 26th of May 2026.
We’ve extracted 4257 sentences with imperative particles (grammaticalised imperatives that have lost their imperative meaning) from GLAUx. We then took a randomised sample of 10.6% of each particle, which we made into this dataset of 450 sentences.

We annotated three parameters: 1) the semantics of the verb that follows the imperative particle 2) the modality of that verb, and 3) whether the particle was in an interrogative sentence or not (see column ‘Question?’). For semantics, each form was annotated at least twice. When two annotators each placed a verb in a different semantic category, it was reviewed by a third person. In the rare cases where that yielded another different annotation, the form was marked ‘unclear’. Each form in ‘modality’ was annotated by one person, except for some unclear sentences, which we discussed before we chose a final category. Because it’s rather easy to distinguish questions from non-questions, this parameter was also reviewed by one person only.

We distinguished the following semantic categories:

Action, movement, NA, no verb, other, saying/seeing, thinking/knowing, trying/endeavouring and unclear.
If the annotated word was not an imperative particle but a “real imperative”, or the sentence turned out to be unusable for another reason, it was marked ‘NA’ (non-applicable).
If the particle did not co-occur with a verb but a different word (e.g. a noun), it was marked ‘no verb’.
When all three of us had a different annotation of a verb, it was marked ‘unclear’.

We distinguished the following modality categories:

Command, counterfactual, counterfactual without main verb (1 sentence), deliberative question, no main clause, no main verb, hortative, potential, prohibitive and wish.
If the particle was in a subordinate clause, it was marked ‘no main clause’.
If the particle did not accompany a verb but rather a different word in the main clause (e.g. a noun), it was marked ‘no main verb’.

We distinguished the following category to distinguish questions from non-questions:
Yes (=question), no (=not a question). If the particle was in a subordinate clause, it was not annotated on this parameter (and thus left blank).