Search results for "preposition"
showing 10 items of 34 documents
De Praepositione: The Emerging of Donatus’s Thought on Syntax?
2020
The paper aims at investigating the syntax treatment in late Antiquity through the analysis of the description of prepositions within Donatus’s Artes. As far as an organic and dedicated description of syntax is concerned, the Roman tradition of grammatical studies in late Antiquity shows an overall gap. However, reflections on syntax emerge from the parts of speech descriptions made by grammarians. The ultimate purpose of this paper is to understand if, and to what extent, traces of emerging thought on syntax can be found in Donatus’s description of prepositions. These are regarded as a syntactic object of study by the modern linguistic theory. To that end, the paper focuses on the textual …
Digging up the frequency of phrasal verbs in English for the Police: the case of up
2016
The present study focuses on the frequency of phrasal verbs with the particle up in the context of crime and police investigative work. This research emerges from the need to enlarge McCarthy and O’Dell’s (2004) scope from purely criminal behavior to police investigative actions. To do so, we relied on a corpus of 504,124 running words made up of spoken dialogues extracted from the script of the American TV series Castle shown on ABC since 2009. Based on Rudzka-Ostyn’s (2003) cognitive motivations for the particle up, we have identified five different meaning extensions for our phrasal verbs. Drawing from these findings, we have designed pedagogical activities for those L2 learners that stu…
Präpositionale Wortgruppen im Altspanischen: 13.-15. Jahrhundert
2013
Der Untersuchungsgegenstand dieser Dissertation sind präpositionale Wortgruppen (PWG) (locuciones prepositivas) in kastilischen Texten aus dem Mittelalter. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist eine kontrastive Analyse von PWG an Hand von zwei Diskurstraditionen, einer juristischen und einer historischen, während des 13., 14. und 15.Jahrhunderts. Das Hauptkorpus beinhaltet zu jedem Jahrhundert einen juristischen und einen chronistischen Text. Um der Gefahr der einseitigen Konzentration auf juristische und chronistische Texte zu entgehen, werden für jedes Jahrhundert ein zusätzlicher Text aus der Gattung der Literatur ausgewertet (Calila e Dimna, El Conde Lucanor und La Celestina). Ausgangspunkt dieser Arb…
Continuity and discontinuity in the semantics of the Latin preposition per: a cognitive hypothesis
2009
We intend to analyse the semantic network of the preposition ‘per’ (“through”, “across” etc.) in Early Latin and the role of its conceptual structure in the spread from basic/spatial to abstract meanings. Although prepositions in ancient languages have raised a great deal of attention, there is little regarding Latin, and an in-depth semantic analysis of Latin prepositions is still lacking. A cognitive-based investigation of Plautus’ comedies (254-184 BCE) shows that, unlike other Indo-European languages, the spatial value rests on a schema representing ‘motion along a path’ not necessarily involving a bounded Landmark. The spatial meanings are predominant in Archaic Latin; the only abstrac…
THE SEMANTIC NETWORK OF THE LATIN PREPOSITION PER: A DIACHRONIC INVESTIGATION
2020
Proponiamo qui i risultati di uno studio corpus-based sugli slittamenti diacronici osservabili nel network semantico della preposizione per in latino. Sulla base della Cognitive Grammar, descriviamo la semantica di per situandola lungo un continuum che procede dal concreto all’astratto, a partire da un contenuto schematico originario; discutiamo, quindi, i percorsi attraverso i quali i nuovi significati astratti emergono attraverso sli ttamenti metonimici, focalizzando la nostra attenzione sui ruoli causali e sulla caratteristica di animatezza.
Asymmetries in path encoding in Sicilian: A diachronic overview
2017
This talk aims at describing the encoding of path within the system of spatial relations in Sicilian, an Italo-Romance language spoken in Sicily and its satellite islands. In general terms, spatial relations in Sicilian remain largely unexplored in the light of the current linguistic theories. As a consequence, the first point addressed in the proposed description is the comparison of Sicilian data with the cross-linguistic scenario. It is generally argued in the relevant literature that the encoding of path appears to be less autonomous compared to source, goal, and location at the cross-linguistic level, and its encoding is frequently based on location (see Stolz 1992). In Sicilian, the s…
Continuity and discontinuity in the semantics of the Latin preposition per: a cognitive hypothesis
2011
Abstract We propose a description of the semantic network of the Latin prepositional phrase per ‘through’ + Accusative in the early stage of this language. Drawing upon the insights of Cognitive Grammar, we analyze the role of the schematic import in the spread from basic to abstract meanings. Finally, we draw a map of the polysemous network of per, showing that the continuity of the different, but consistently linked, meanings does not necessarily imply the unidirectionality of the concrete-to-abstract shifts.
Searching for Syntax in the Early Medieval Commentaries on Donatus
2023
This study aims at contributing to the reconstruction of the metalanguage and the specific terminology used by grammarians with reference to the reflection on syntax, as it emerges from the analysis of Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages grammar texts. The study focuses on the description of prepositions within the commentaries on Donatus’s Artes. Despite the overall lack of a systematic treatment of syntax within the Greek-Latin grammatical tradition, the description of specific partes orationis, e.g. praepositio, shows actually traces of a certain reflection on syntax. The metaterminology used by grammarians to describe the mutual relation between linguistic elements seems to go even bey…
Rapporti di reggenza? Una descrizione ambivalente nella tradizione grammaticale tardoantica e medioevale
2023
This study aims to shed light on the historical development of a linguistic theory with reference to syntax in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, through an investigation of grammatical works related to Donatus, since a reflection on syntax emerges from the commentaries and from other grammatical works connected with his artes. This investigation focuses on the description of the government relation between praepositio and casus, through a preliminary collection of the occurrences of both terms with the Cross Database Searchtool of Brepols Publishers as a digital tool, and based on a textual analysis of the de praepositione sections included in a selection of grammatical works ranging from…
Agency and agentive prepositions in Late Latin
2011
I propose the results of an analysis whose object is the expression of the Agent by means of a prepositional phrase in Post-Classical and Late Latin passive constructions. My interest comprises both the prepositions used in Latin to encode the passive Agent (namely ab), and those constituting the bases for the development in the Romance languages (namely per and de). The analysis is based on the functional approach to Transitivity proposed by Hopper and Thompson 1980 and on Cognitive Grammar, specifically on Langaker 1991 and the various Luraghi’s works on prepositions and cases in ancient Indo-European languages.