Linguistic Analysis and Ancient Indo-European Languages

Using modern linguistic theory to describe ‘dead’ languages is one of the theoretical and methodological challenges in contemporary linguistic research. In fact, theories of the twentieth century mostly aimed to account for speakers’ linguistic competence, thus basing their analysis on live speakers and their intuitions. However, drawing on evidence from languages such as Vedic, Greek, Latin, Hittite, Gothic, Celtic and Proto-Indo-European itself, the relevance of the ancient Indo-European languages to contemporary linguistic theory has been constantly shown, since the rise of the linguistic sciences in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the observation of ancient Indo-European language…

Il Tempo tra protomorfologia e rappresentazione sintattica.

Introduction

Studying Ancient Greek offers new insights for linguistic theory. Thanks to the amount of available written data of a large corpus at our disposal, it is possible for a linguist to test hypotheses from modern theories in order to explain language phenomena, without disregarding a description according to methodologies adopted in traditional analyses of ancient languages. In particular, the morphological complexity of the Greek verb with its highly intricate inflectional system provide a valuable basis for an in-depth-analysis of the mechanisms which regulate the functioning of a language in the mind of the speaker. Crucially, in recent times also deductive methodologies adopted in the gener…

L’occhio della mente. Un’eredità indoeuropea nei poemi omerici

“Lila” di R. Pirsig: incontro e/o scontro tra letteratura e scienza

Un’isoglossa indoeuropea per mantis? in G. Rocca (a cura di), Dialetti, dialettismi, generi letterari e funzioni sociali. Atti del V Convegno Internazionale di Linguistica Greca. Milano 12-13 settembre 2002

L'articolo presenta la ricostruzione fonologica in diacronia degli esiti della sonante nasale indoeuropea nel greco antico. In particolare, attraverso un'analisi tipologico-comparativa, che pure attinge ai dati provenienti dalla ricerca archeologica, storica ed epigrafica, viene dimostrato come la presunta irregolarità dell'esito "an" in luogo di "a" davanti a consonante in alcuni tra i più antichi termini del lessico greco (tra cui mantis) sia in realtà da attribuirsi ad un esito originario "an", che accomunerebbe il greco antico alla maggior parte delle altre lingue sorelle indoeuropee antiche, dall'ittita al frigio, dall'antico irlandese all'armeno, dal bretone al celtiberico, ecc. Già l…

Generativismo e Cognitivismo: teorie grammaticali a confronto

Towards a Reconstruction of Indo-European Culture: Semantic Functions of IE *men-

The aim of this paper is to recover the semantic values involved in IE *men- in order to reconstruct some cognitive process modalities in regard to "Indo-European ideology" (Campanile 1992). After focusing on the apparent semantic split noticeable between Homeric Greek and Vedic in the uses derived from *men-, I argue for the presence of striking parallel paths using the methods of textual comparison. Then, the role of lexical nucleus' polysemy in originating the linguistic change is highlighted, without disregarding an Indo-European typological perspective within the realm of the so-called "basic lexicon" to which the root at issue belongs.

Sulle origini della ‘telicità’: κίνησις ed ἐνέργεια in Aristotele

Nell’ambito della classificazione aspettuale dei verbi un ruolo particolare riveste la distinzione del tratto telico-atelico, alla base della tradizionale suddivisione tra le classi vendleriane rispettivamente di accomplishment e achievement da una parte e states e activities dall’altra. Nonostante la rilevanza di tale tratto nella riflessione linguistica contemporanea, a tutt’oggi gli studiosi non condividono una definizione univoca della telicità, soprattutto perché dietro ad ogni definizione si nasconde una diversa prospettiva teorica. Scopo del presente lavoro è un’analisi dell’origine del termine nella teoria linguistica, che è solita ricondurre la distinzione del tratto telico-atelico…

Coincidenze compositive tra la IV Ode Romana di Orazio e la I Pitica di Pindaro

Spatial representations of future in Homeric Greek

The aim of this paper is to investigate the space-time mapping of the future in Homeric Greek. It is widely accepted that the spatial adverbs πρόσσω ‘in front’ and ὀπίσσω ‘behind’ in the Homeric poems are used to portray temporal events located in a sequence of aligned entities that follow one after the other on the same path (Dunkel, 1983, p. 66). In such a temporal sequence, or Time-rp model, those adverbs are associated respectively to past and future events in a bipartite spatial representation of time, without involving a deictic ego-experiencer. After analyzing data from the Homeric poems in a cognitive linguistic perspective, it is found that some temporal uses of the preposition πρό…

Spatial representations of the future in Homeric Greek

The aim of this paper is to investigate the space-time mapping of the future in Homeric Greek. It is widely accepted that the spatial adverbs πρόσσω ‘in front’ and ὀπίσσω ‘behind’ in the Homeric poems are used to portray temporal events located in a sequence of aligned entities that follow one after the other on the same path (Dunkel 1983: 66). In such a temporal sequence, or Time-RP model, those adverbs are associated respectively to past and future events in a dichotomous spatial representation of time, without involving a deictic ego-experiencer. After analyzing data from the Homeric poems in a cognitive linguistic perspective, it is found that some temporal uses of the preposition πρό ‘…

On syntactic diagnostics as tests for telicity in ancient Indo-European languages. Evidence from Vedic and Greek

The aim of this paper is to assay the reliability of completive and durative adverbials as linguistic tests for telicity in a historical perspective. Until now such tests have been applied only to contemporary languages, which provide both written and spoken corpora. However, if the compatibility with for/in-adverbials is a reliable test, it should function not only crosslinguistically, but also with ancient and reconstructed languages. I will use digital corpora of Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek texts to explore the compatibility of temporal expressions with a selected sample of verbs that derive from a previous Indo-European common stage.

INHERENT TELICITY AND PROTO- INDO-EUROPEAN VERBAL PARADIGMS

In recent aspectual classi}cations telicity is described as a compositional syntactic property, and verbs are analyzed as complex structures made up of completely neutral roots. However, semantic changes due to both derivational processes and di‰erent syntactic contexts could have obscured the relationship between root lexical aspect and verb morphological paradigms. The purpose of this paper is to show that telicity can be considered as an inherent lexical property: the co-occurrence in a sentence with arguments, adverbials or speci}c pragmatic contexts which can (de)telicize the event described by a verb has consequences at syntactic level, whereas the prototypical aspect of the root is p…

Towards a reconstruction of Indo-European culture: semantic functions of IE *men-

Indo-European language reconstruction has allowed us to advance some hypotheses with regard to possible reconstructing cultural contents of what has been defined “Indo-European ideology” (Campanile 1992). The method of textual comparison, which compares no longer and not merely single lexical items or single syntactic constructions, but the whole literary systems too, is able to bring out linguistic and extra-linguistic reference contexts. The interest in reconstructing the Indo-European “basic lexicon” is renewed in the light of recent typological criteria of root classification (according to their active or stative meaning): the focus today is on drawing up the so-called “global etymologi…

On temporal deixis and cognitive models in early Indo-European

Crosslinguistic evidence suggest that there are two different (often coexistent) basic cognitive models for time, on the basis of which the world’s languages express time in terms of conceptual metaphor from the source spatial domain to the target temporal domain: i) the Time-based (Time-Reference-Point) model, in which time is conceptualized in terms of sequentially arrayed objects moving in space, so that a temporal event is relative to another earlier or later temporal event; ii) the Ego-based (Ego-Reference-Point) model, which is considered to have a more complex structure in which times are conceptualized as objects relative to a canonical deictic observer (Ego) located at the hic et n…