• Property-Referring.
• Periphrasis
• Perfective
• Imperfective
• Atelic
• Aspect
• Adjectival
• Activity
• Actionality
• Stative
• Telic
• Tense
• Verbal
• Εἶναι

This thesis aims at carrying out an aspectual and actional analysis of the Post-Hellenistic Greek periphrastic construction 'εἶναι + participle' occurring in a number of Christian and Hebrew texts dating from about I b.C to IV / V A.D.
In the first chapter, both a critical overview of the major issues (periphrasticity, grammaticalization, functional classification, Semitic influence) and an explanation of the categories of Aspect and Aktionsart (alongside with other relevant notions, such as Tense and Semantic Roles) are provided.
In the second chapter, all the periphrastic occurrences found in the examined data are divided into three sections on functional basis: adjectival, property-referring and verbal; periphrases in the future Tense are analyzed separately. In each section, an aspectual and actional analysis is carried out, alongside with discussions about other relevant issues (such as coordination between periphrastic and synthetic forms or supposed substitute periphrases).
In the third chapter, conclusions are drawn. Adjectival and property-referring periphrases select either stative or "stativized" predicates. As far as verbal periphrases are concerned, they seem to show an interrelation between Aspect and Actionality: periphrases encoding the Imperfective Aspect select atelic predicates, while periphrases encoding the Perfective Aspect select telic predicates (there are indeed exceptions, but they can be all explained); moreover, Imperfective periphrases show the tendency to specifically encode aspectual values, while Perfective ones show the tendency to specifically encode temporal values. Lastly, the preference for periphrastic constructions instead of synthetic forms is probably motivated by both the Semitic influence that seems to affect the corpus examined and the general tendency towards analicity that is detectable in Post-Hellenistic Greek.
In the fourth chapter, all the occurrences found in the examined data are reported, alongside with their translation.