Sistemi di orientamento nel latino di Plauto

This paper investigates the spatial Frames of Reference (FoRs) in Old Latin within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Differently from modern romance languages, which are heavily based on the so-called relative FoR, ancient Indo-European languages such as Vedic and Homeric Greek did not make use of such an egocentric orientation system at their earliest stage, since the relation between FIGURE and GROUND was not specified by imposing an external deictic observer’s viewpoint. the aim of this study is to add the perspective of Old Latin, by focusing on the contexts of use of spatial terms of FRONT, BEHIND, LEFT, RIGHT in the comedies of Plautus. The results of this analysis are consisten…

La metafora Spazio-Tempo in prospettiva: evidenze linguistiche del “futuro dietro le spalle”.

IE *weid- as a Root with Dual Subcategorization Features in the Homeric Poems.

This paper is organized as follows: the first section sketches the theoretical background involved in the case study of Old Greek éidon/óida. As is well known, the aorist éidon takes only an accusative DP-object, while the perfect óida can take either a genitive or an accusative DP-object. Sections 2-5 I aim to prove that the diachronic development of the root *weid- in early Greek must be take into consideration to explain the synchronic phenomenon of dual subcategorization features. This root proves indeed to be polysemous and is split into two different meanings which are lexicalised by means of different bridging contexts and different morphological developments. In section 6 the peculi…

La sintassi della dipendenza nella prima grammatica dell’aymara

Recenti studi di storia della linguistica (Imrényi & Mazziotta 2020) hanno rilevato la necessità di ricostruire le origini del concetto moderno di dipendenza sintattica e dell'approccio basato sulla gerarchia delle relazioni grammaticali, comunemente associati al noto modello teorico di Tesnière (1959/2015). In questo ambito, lo studio delle grammatiche della prima età moderna e, in particolare, delle prime grammatiche missionarie, si rivela un fecondo campo d'indagine. La necessità di abbandonare le rigide norme della grammatica latina, spesso non adatte alla descrizione di lingue sconosciute, né in grado di offrire un modello teorico sistematico e una terminologia coerente nel dominio…

The Homeric compound Ὑπερίων and the sun in the Indo-European culture

This paper aims at reconstructing the semantic meaning of Homeric Ὑπερίων, the epithet of the sun, whose etymology is still not clear. After presenting the modern interpretations, which describe it as an adjective in the comparative form derived from the adverbial particle ὑπέρ ‘up, above’, the ancient grammarians’ hypothesis on Ὑπερίων as a compound is tested, taking into consideration the textual analysis of those discourse contexts in which the terms for sun are used in archaic Greek and Vedic Sanskrit in comparative perspective. In particular, the co-occurrence with the motion verb go, i.e. εἶμι and i from the same IE root *h1ey-, in the Homeric poems and in the Rigveda respectively, mi…

Tra continuo e discreto. Recenti tendenze nella linguistica contemporanea

This paper investigates the relationship between continuum and discretum within recent theoretical approaches in contemporary linguistics, focusing in particular on the interaction with epistemological and methodological aspects common to physical-mathematical theoretical models

Sulle origini della dipendenza sintattica nella linguistica missionaria

Deissi spaziale e verbi di movimento in vedico

This study is part of a broader research project on temporal and spatial deixis in the Proto-Indo-European language. Specifically, the aim of this paper is to investigate the basic motion verbs go and come in Vedic. The deictic component of PATH has often been considered as inherent to the lexical semantics of these verbs cross-linguistically. However, I will show that Vedic i “go”, gā “go; come; step” and gam “go; come” express a deictically-neutral meaning of ‘moving along a path’, which is not characterized with regard to both MANNER and PATH. Data suggest that these verbs can take on a deictic interpretation by cooccurring with specific particles, adverbs, demonstratives, and personal p…

Root lexical features and inflectional marking of tense in Proto-Indo-European

This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition. The dispute over this issue is well-known; it has been pursued mostly by scholars following various general linguistic approaches, from typology to acquisition, but also by historical linguists and Indo-Europeanists, who have long debated about the precedence of aspect or tense from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. However, so far Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a successful way with re…

On the typology of motion events in Aymara

This paper investigates the lexicalization pattern of motion events in Aymara, an Andean language spoken in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. After providing a description of the morphosyntax of translational motion events, this study aims at a preliminary typological classification of Aymara within the framework of Talmy’s typology (Talmy 2000). With this purpose, three diagnostic tests have been used to determine the basic framing-typology of motion events. These tests consider i) the size of manner-of-motion lexicon and, more broadly, the degree of manner salience, ii) the complex-path constructions and the use of ‘plus-ground’ clauses, iii) the expression of boundary-crossing. The results of th…

Sulla codifica degli eventi di moto in greco omerico: il ruolo dell'aspetto lessicale

This paper aims at investigating the encoding strategy of motion events in Homeric Greek. Based on Talmy’s theoretical framework (1985; 2000; 2007; 2009), this study focuses on a rather neglected topic on motion events description, i.e. the role of verbal inherent lexical aspect (Aktionsart). The analysis takes into account the occurrences of the verbs for run in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In particular, the verbs θέω, τρέχω, ἔδραμον show a non-random distribution with the co-occurring spatial particles as PATH-satellites. Textual data suggest that the [±telic] aspectual feature plays a fundamental role for both the entailment of the arrival of the FIGURE (the moving object) to the GROUND (…

Spatial Cognition and Frames of Reference in Indo-European

The development of Frames of Reference (FoRs) as coordinate systems in space language has gained increasing attention in current linguistic, neurolinguistic, and psycholinguistic research (Diessel 2013: 687; Kemmerer 2010). Previous studies on typology of spatial expressions have traditionally been based on the universal status of the egocentric or relative FoR found in the Indo- European languages, in which the relation between Figure and Ground is specified by the deictic observer’s viewpoint (Mühlhäusler 2001). However, there is growing crosslinguistic evidence that many non-Indo-European languages do not make use of such deictic or ternary FoR, but interpret spatial relations by referri…

Spatio-temporal deixis and cognitive models in early Indo-European

AbstractThis paper is a comparative study based on the linguistic evidence in Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek, aimed at reconstructing the space-time cognitive models used in the Proto-Indo-European language in a diachronic perspective. While it has been widely recognized that ancient Indo-European languages construed earlier (and past) events as in front of later ones, as predicted in the Time-Reference-Point mapping, it is less clear how in the same languages the passage took place from this ‘archaic’ Time-RP model or non-deictic sequence, in which future events are behind or follow the past ones in a temporal sequence, to the more recent ‘post-archaic’ Ego-RP model that is found only fr…

On deictic motion verbs in Homeric Greek

This paper investigates the basic motion verbs ‘go’ and ‘come’ in Homeric Greek. In particular, it aims to examinewhether the deictic component,which is usually ascribed to the inherent semantic meaning of these verbs cross–linguistically, has to be considered as a prototypical semantic property of εἶμι ‘go’ and βαίνω ‘step; go; come’. These latter can indeed take a deictic interpretation at a pragmatic, syntactic or discourse level, but I will show how the deictic component is not inherently associated with their lexical semantics. Data from the contexts of use of these verbs, in both narrative discourse and direct speech, strongly suggest that the original semantic opposition between ‘go’…