The encoding of the semantic role of direction may display animacy based differential marking. Cross-linguistic data also show that both human and inanimate direction may be encoded in the same way as the semantic role of recipient. After briefly surveying some attested patterns in the encoding of these three semantic roles, the paper concentrates on three Ancient Indo-European languages, Hittite, Latin and Ancient Greek. Among them, only Hittite makes use of the dative case to encode direction, while in the other languages the dative is limited to the role of recipient. Homeric Greek displays a cross-linguistically infrequent pattern, with the illative preposition extending to human direction. This pattern is dropped in Attic-Ionic prose.
Human landmarks as landmarks of direction expressions in ancient Indo-European languages.
Luraghi, Silvia
2022-01-01
Abstract
The encoding of the semantic role of direction may display animacy based differential marking. Cross-linguistic data also show that both human and inanimate direction may be encoded in the same way as the semantic role of recipient. After briefly surveying some attested patterns in the encoding of these three semantic roles, the paper concentrates on three Ancient Indo-European languages, Hittite, Latin and Ancient Greek. Among them, only Hittite makes use of the dative case to encode direction, while in the other languages the dative is limited to the role of recipient. Homeric Greek displays a cross-linguistically infrequent pattern, with the illative preposition extending to human direction. This pattern is dropped in Attic-Ionic prose.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
