Greek prepositions: patterns of polysemization and semantic bleaching.

So-called proper prepositions build a peculiar word class, since, in Homeric Greek, they have a three-fold behavior, as adpositions, adverbs, and preverbs. In all their uses, these particles mostly retain their original spatial meaning; however, especially when used as preverbs and as adpositions, they also tend to undergo semantic bleaching, and the extent to which they express a specific local relation becomes limited, already in Homer. This process goes along with the development of abstract meanings. Furthermore, proper prepositions allow case variation, and different cases in Homer partly denote properties of referents, as e.g. continuity/discontinuity. In Classical Greek, the particles no longer have adverbial usage; both as preverbs and as prepositions they display traces of high grammaticalization, including further semantic bleaching. Cases loose the meaning they could express in Homer, as one can see in particular in the case of the opposition between the genitive and the accusative. Local relations are often expressed by adverbial prepositions, i.e. local adverbs, mostly derived from proper prepositions. In my lecture I would like to focus on the onset of the process of semantic weakening. I will show which common patterns of semantic development can be detected among adpositions in Homeric Greek, which eventually led them to be partly replaced in their concrete local usage by other adverbs. Recurring patterns of semantic bleaching are (a) loss of partitive value of the prepositional genitive; (b) loss of constrains on the types of noun that can occur with each specific adposition; (c) change of orientation (in the case of adpositions that denote verticality).