From space words to transitive markers: the case of ancient Greek en‘in’¹

Abstract

While in many Indo‐European languages preverbs become markers of increased transitivity, in Homeric Greek they maintain their concrete local or directional function, and therefore may be compared with prepositions. Here we investigate how the prepositional use and the preverbal use may be performed by the same local particle, en‘in’. It appears that prepositions are used with nouns denoting inanimate objects. Instead, preverbs mainly select topical complements, which have human referents or are represented by personal pronouns. These results tally with the use of applicative structures outside the Indo‐European domain. Since topical complements are interpreted as referring to entire items that are completely affected by the verbal action, topicality appears to be the connection between space and transitivity.

Reciprocal constructions in Homeric Greek: A typological and corpus-based approach

“…Zanchi forthc. ; on Vedic,Danesi 2009;Kulikov 2012; on AG, Horrocks 1981;Viti 2008). Importantly for the aims of this paper, previous scholars assigned to IE and AG preverbs the ability to occur in RCs (cf.Kulikov 2007 on Vedic;Nedjalkov et al 2007: passim on AG, Latin, and Sanskrit.…”

El prefijo de- con valor aplicativo. Estudio de pereo y depereo en el corpus de Plauto

“…participan en este cambio (entre otros, Viti 2008) y que, pese a lo que proponen las teorías localistas, no puede achacarse solo a la semántica del preverbio (en el caso de de, un movimiento vertical descendente según García Hernández 2002). Además de eso, la naturaleza del elemento que se transforma en argumento verbal con función de objeto desempeña un papel determinante (de nuevo, Viti 2008).…”