Search results for "Homeric Greek"

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

2002

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…

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…

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 ‘…

All’origine della deissi indoeuropea. Un approccio linguistico cognitivo

2020

This paper focuses on the existence of temporal deixis in Indo-European, questioning the traditional view according to which metaphors of time in ancient Indo-European languages originated from projecting the human body coordinates onto space. In particular, it aims at interpreting data from historical-comparative linguistics by using the cognitive linguistic framework, without disregarding the most recent results from typological studies, spatial language acquisition, and neurolinguistic research on spatiotemporal deixis. Contrary to what previously assumed, the comparative analysis between the Rigveda and the Homeric poems shows that earlier spatial metaphors of time are still deictically…

Sul suppletivismo verbale in Omero: l’apporto della prospettiva tipologica talmiana

2020

This paper aims at investigating the partially uncertain relationship on which the suppletion of the Homeric verbal forms within the paradigm for ‘go’ is based. For this purpose, the Homeric distribution of some motion verbs for ‘go’, as well as their contexts of use, are taken into account. In the light of Talmy’s theoretical framework of the lexicalization patterns, the analysis focuses on the motion events expressed by ἔρχομαι and ἦλϑον (fut. ἐλεύσομαι, pf. εἰλήλουϑα) and their cooccurring spatial elements, i.e. particles, adverbs, nominal case markers, which encode the path followed by the moving object. Building on telicity as a verb-inherent actional feature (i.e. Lexical Aspect), and…

Going in Homer: The Role of Verb-Inherent Actionality Within Self-Propelled Motion-Event Encoding

2019

The paper aims at investigating the encoding of self-propelled motion events in Homeric Greek in the light of the typology of motion events, taking into account the case of to go. The verbal class of the self-propelled motion refers to those verbs expressing the idea of a simple translational motion, such as to go, to move, without any information about the manner of motion (see, by contrast, the class of the manner-of-motion verbs, such as to run, to swim) or about the path of motion (see, by contrast, the class of the path verbs, such as to enter, to exit). According to Talmy (2000), world languages can be distinguished depending on whether they prototypically express the semantic compone…

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

2017

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.

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

2014

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…

Proto-Indo-European verbal suppletion and emerging paradigms

2008

The existence of suppletion in a Proto-Indo-European language is still a question of debate (García Ramón 2002). While the evidence for such a phenomenon has been widely recognized within the verbal system of most Indo-European languages, some scholars describe it as a recent monoglot development which characterizes the history of each single language without involving a previous common stage. According to Strunk (1977), the hypothesis of a PIE suppletive paradigm based on the alternation of verbal roots such as *es- and *bhu- “be”, or *ei-/i- and *gwa-/ gwem - “go”, must be ruled out because it violates the so-called criterium-b, i.e. complementary distribution of the forms involved in a s…

Spatial representations of future in Homeric Greek

2015

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…