Search results for " Indo-European"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Linguistic Analysis and Ancient Indo-European Languages
2015
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…
Wh-Relative Clauses and Left Periphery from Latin to some Romance Languages
2011
The paper is organized as follows: after an introduction of the issue we will examine, in the first section we shall discuss the theory of the antisymmetry of syntax as specifically concerns relative clauses, evidencing also problems linked to the application of this theory to the syntax of relative clauses in Latin and in other Indo-European languages; the second section will present our first attempt at some analysis of the left periphery of the Proto-Indo-European sentence; in the third section we shall discuss the categorial status of the relative pronoun in Latin and we shall produce a model of the left periphery of the Latin subordinate clause, supplying examples taken from literary a…
Sistemi di orientamento nel latino di Plauto
2021
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…
A Few Remarks on the Left Periphery in Indo-European
2011
The paper is organized as follows: the first section describes the different perspectives which separate generative historical linguistics and conventional comparative philology; since a generative approach to Indo-European linguistics does not appear more hypothetical than the way of dealing with de syntax of the ancestor language adopted by conventional comparative philology, in the second section an attempt is made to apply the formal apparatus of generative grammar to Indo-European syntax by making some brief remarks about the so-called left periphery of the sentence of the proto-language.
Sulla corporeità del processo cognitivo nei poemi omerici: il caso di μαίνομαι
2019
The aim of this paper is to shed light on the striking connection between, on the one hand, the cognitive process in Homer and, on the other, the verb μαίνομαι (and the forms from the perfect stem μεμον-/μεμα-), which represents the ultimate example of Ancient Greek verb conveying the idea of “raging, being furious/mad/insane”. Besides those common meanings, the analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey shows that the semantic complexity of μαίνομαι actually includes the idea of “thinking”, due to the inner polysemy of the IE root *men-, to which the verb at issue traces back, as well as the Homeric lack of distinction between body and mind. More specifically, the verb also refers to a range of…
The Homeric compound Ὑπερίων and the sun in the Indo-European culture
2017
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…
A particular coordination structure of Indo-European flavour
2005
The article aims to account for the various, often unexpected positions of the conjunction in coordinated constructions of ancient Indo-European languages, among them Hittite, Ancient Greek, Latin and Vedic Sanskrit. The coordination possibilities of ancient Indo-European languages are derived from the binary branching hypotheses of Universal Grammar, with the result that not only seemingly idiosyncratic facts of a number of languages receive a principled explanation, but also a speculative hypothesis of Universal Grammar receives empirical support; ancient Indo-European languages realize possibilities that are derivable from the Munn-Kayne theory but have not been attested so far.
Spatial Cognition and Frames of Reference in Indo-European
2022
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…
Perspectives on Language and Linguistics
2021
The scientific interests of Lucio Melazzo have been addressed to diverse research fields, from ancient to modern Indo-European languages, from etymology to formal syntax, from history of linguistics to studies on ancient Greek philosophers. On occasion of his retirement from his university activities, we have decided to offer him this volume, which gathers the contributions of many distinguished scholars who have accepted to participate in this project. We appreciate that the variety of the book contents reflects the variety of Lucio Melazzo’s own interests.
On temporal deixis and cognitive models in early Indo-European
2013
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…