A Construction Grammar approach to Ancient Greek argument structure constructions

Two-place verbs with nominative subjects in Ancient Greek can take either the accusative or the genitive or the dative as a second argument. Typically, the same case can combine with groups of cases that are semantically quite disparate: Greek cases are highly polysemous morphemes. Diachronically, polysemy is the outcome of case syncretism, i.e., the merger of inflectional categories. Accounting for case polysemy in synchrony, however, is a more complicated matter: crucially, information about diachronic developments is not available to speakers. Traditionally, case selection by specific verb is explained based on the individual meaning of cases. Contrary to this well-established tradition, in this paper I consider the case of the second argument as part of whole constructions, and focus on construction variation among NomAcc, NomDat and NomGen argument structure constructions. More specifically, I view the occurrence of one of the three constructions with semantically different verb groups as partly due to constructional polysemy but partly also constructional homonymy