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Article published In:
Constructions and Frames
Vol. 10:1 (2018) ► pp.61–97

A frame-based approach to the source-goal asymmetry

Synchronic and diachronic evidence from Ancient Greek

| University of Liège |

This paper investigates the asymmetrical behavior of Sources and Goals of motion in Homeric and Classical Greek within the frame semantics paradigm. In particular, based on a corpus of 26 works covering four text types, it is shown that (a) regardless of their semantic class, motion verbs display preference for Goal paths compared to Source ones; (b) the frame that a verb belongs to affects the type of path chosen only to a certain degree that does not change the Source-Goal imbalance; (c) semantically incongruent motion verb – path combinations are naturally less frequent than congruent combinations, but within the category of incongruent combinations the tokens are distributed in a way that reflects the prevalence of Goals; (d) the number of markers for the encoding of Goal is higher than that of Source; and (e) Source and Goal markers interact with Place ones in an asymmetrical way: Goal markers come to encode Place and, similarly, Place markers come to express Goal. Conversely, the interaction of markers exhibiting Source-Place polysemy is unidirectional, in the sense that none of these markers was originally used to encode Place alone. Theoretical implications of the study are discussed and directions for future research are suggested.

Keywords: Source-Goal asymmetry, Ancient Greek, frame semantics, motion verbs, language of space
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Expression of Source and Goal in Ancient Greek
  • 3.Methodology: Data and corpus
  • 4.Corpus analysis
    • 4.1Corpus analysis I: Neutral verbs with respect to directionality
      • 4.1.1Classification
      • 4.1.2Hypothesis and analysis
    • 4.2Corpus analysis II: Manner verbs
      • 4.2.1Classification
      • 4.2.2Hypothesis and analysis
    • 4.3Corpus analysis III: Directional verbs
      • 4.3.1Classification
      • 4.3.2Hypotheses and analysis
    • 4.4The Ancient Greek motion events frequency continuum
  • 5.Asymmetries in the inventories for the denotation of Goals and Sources
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00011.geo
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