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From space words to transitive markers: the case of ancient Greek en ‘in’ 1
Author(s) -
Viti Carlotta
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-968x.2008.00204.x
Subject(s) - transitive relation , noun , linguistics , space (punctuation) , action (physics) , personal pronoun , connection (principal bundle) , mathematics , subject (documents) , domain (mathematical analysis) , computer science , pure mathematics , psychology , combinatorics , philosophy , physics , geometry , mathematical analysis , quantum mechanics , library science
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.