| Summary: | The combination of the verb ἔχω with the active or middle aorist participle (e. g. ἔχω γράψας) acquires a limited degree of productivity as a periphrastic construction in classical Greek literature, notably tragedy (Sophocles, Euripides) and Herodotean prose. Traditionally, this so-called σχῆμα Σοφόκλειον has been regarded as a suppletive periphrasis stepping in for as yet unavailable synthetic perfect forms at a time when the (object-)resultative use of the perfect became increasingly widespread. However, a variety of distributional, formal, and semantic arguments speak against this theory. Instead, it is argued here that the σχῆμα Σοφόκλειον arose as a means of disambiguating resultative from narrative aorists, and that only its disappearance in the fourth century is directly related to the history of the perfect. Since it had always been confined to a relatively narrow range of linguistic registers and pragmatic contexts, the σχῆμα fell out of use as the perfect gradually strengthened its hold on the resultative domain.
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