Cover not available
Part of
Space in Diachrony
Edited by Silvia Luraghi, Tatiana Nikitina and Chiara Zanchi
[Studies in Language Companion Series 188] 2017
► pp. 119–146

Differential Goal marking vs. differential Source marking in Ancient Greek

| University of Pavia
Differential marking of Goal and Source is a relatively underresearched topic. Available cross-linguistic evidence points toward two possible triggers of differential marking of spatial relations, that is, nouns that denote spatial regions and animate nouns. In this paper, differential Goal and differential Source marking are studied based on the evidence of a diachronic corpus, consisting of the Homeric poems and Herodotus’ Histories. In Homeric Greek, differential marking with nouns that denote spatial regions is available to a marginal extent for Goal, and unavailable for Source, while no differential marking occurs in Herodotus. Animacy conditioned differential marking is well attested both for Goal and for Source in Herodotus, but Homer offers evidence only for differential marking of Source. Apparently, Goal adpositions used for inanimate landmarks are also compatible with animates, while Source adpositions developed at an early stage animacy conditioned meanings that make them unsuitable for indicating simple concrete motion away from a human being.
Keywords: differential case marking, Goal, Source, Ancient Greek, types of landmarks, animacy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Differential case marking
    • 2.1Differential marking of core arguments
    • 2.2Other types of DCM
  • 3.Differential marking of spatial relations in Ancient Greek
    • 3.1Nouns with spatial reference
    • 3.2Goal expressions with human landmarks in Homer
    • 3.3Source expressions with human landmarks in Homer
    • 3.4DCM in Herodotus
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.188.05lur
References (30)
References
Aristar, Anthony Rodriguez. 1997. Marking and hierarchy: Types and grammaticalization of case markers. Studies in Language 21(2): 313–368.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bossong, Georg. 1985. Differentielle Objektmarkierung in den Neuiranischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Chantraine, Pierre. 1953. Grammaire homérique, Tome 2: Syntaxe. Paris: Klinksiek.Google Scholar
. 2013. Grammaire homérique, Tome 1: Phonologie et Morphologie. Paris: Klinksiek.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard.1986. Markedness, grammar, people, and the world. In Markedness, Edith A. Moravcsik & Jessica Wirth (eds), 85–106. New York NY: Plenum Press.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cuyckens, Hubert. 1993. Spatial prepositions in French revisited. Cognitive Linguistics 4(3): 291–310.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hackstein, Olav. 2010. The Greek of Epic. In A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, Egbert J. Bakker (ed), 401–423. Chichester: Wiley.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 2001. Non-canonical marking of core arguments in European languages. In Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects [Typological Studies in Language 46], Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Robert M. W. Dixon & Masayuki Onishi (eds), 53–83. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoop de, Helen & de Swart, Peter (eds). 2008. Differential Subject Marking. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Iemmolo, Giorgio. 2010. Topicality and differential object marking: Evidence from Romance and beyond. Studies in Language 34(2): 239–272.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Iemmolo, Giorgio & Klumpp, Gerson. 2014. Introduction to the special issue differential object marking: Theoretical and empirical issues. Linguistics 52(2): 271–279.Google Scholar
Kittilä, Seppo. 2008. Animacy effects on differential goal marking. Linguistic Typology 12(2): 245–268.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. The markedness of direction: The (allative and illative) case(s) of Finnish. In Perspectives on Semantic Roles [Typological Studies in Language 106], Silvia Luraghi & Heiko Narrog (eds), 151–179. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kittilä, Seppo & Ylikoski, Jussi. 2011. Remarks on the coding of direction, recipient and vicinal direction in European Uralic. In Case, Animacy and Semantic Roles [Typological Studies in Language 99], Seppo Kittilä, Katja Västi & Jussi Ylikoski (eds), 29–64. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kopecka, Anetta & Narasimhan, Bhuvana. 2012. Events of Putting and Taking. A Crosslinguistic Perspective [Typological Studies in Language 100]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 1997. Turkish. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Liddell & Scott. 2009=The Online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon. 〈[URL]〉Google Scholar
Luraghi, Silvia. 1986. On the distribution of instrumental and agent markers for human and non-human agents of passive verbs in some Indo-European languages. Indogermanische Forschungen 91: 48–66.Google Scholar
. 1989. Cause and Instrument expressions in Classical Greek. Mnemosyne 43: 294–308.Google Scholar
. 1997. Hittite. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
. 2003. On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases. The Expression of Semantic Roles in Ancient Greek [Studies in Language Companion Series 67]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010. Where do beneficiaries come from and how do they come about? In Historical Cognitive Linguistics, Margaret E. Winters, Heli Tissari, & Kathryn Allan (eds), 93–131. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011. Human landmarks in spatial expressions: From Latin to Romance. In Case, Animacy and Semantic Roles [Typological Studies in Language 99], Seppo Kittilä, Katja Västi & Jussi Ylikoski (eds), 209–234. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Luraghi, Silvia & Huumo, Tuomas. 2014. Introduction. In Partitive Cases and Related Categories, Silvia Luraghi & Huumo Tuomas (eds), 1–13. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Malchukov, Andrej. 2008. Animacy and asymmetries in differential case marking. Lingua 118: 203–221.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nikitina, Tatiana & Maslov, Boris. 2013. Redefining constructio praegnans: On the variation between allative and locative expressions in Ancient Greek. Journal of Greek Linguistics 13: 105–142.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sands, Kristina & Campbell, Lyle. 2001. Non-canonical subjects and objects in finnish. In Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects [Typological Studies in Language 46], Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Robert M. W. Dixon & Masayuki Onishi (eds), 251–305. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stolz, Thomas, Lestrade, Sander & Stolz, Christel. 2014. The Crosslinguistics of Zero-Marking of Spatial Relations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tribulato, Olga. 2010. Literary dialects. In A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, Egbert J. Bakker (ed), 388–400. Chichester: Wiley.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Ursini, Francesco-Alessio & Tong Wu
2024. On Italian spatial prepositions and measure phrases: reconciling the data with theoretical accounts. Linguistics 62:2 ► pp. 491 ff. DOI logo
Luraghi, Silvia, Chiara Naccarato & Erica Pinelli
2020. Theu+gen construction in Modern Standard Russian. Cognitive Linguistics 31:1 ► pp. 149 ff. DOI logo
Haspelmath, Martin
2019. Differential place marking and differential object marking. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 72:3 ► pp. 313 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.