On the polysemy of motion verbs in Ancient Greek and Coptic
Why lexical constructions are important
In this paper, we propose a constructional analysis of the meanings of two generic motion verbs in Ancient Greek and Coptic (Sahidic dialect), the verbs baínō and bôk, respectively, both of which are glossed as ‘go’ and are characterized by extensive polysemy. We argue that an adequate analysis of these meanings can only be achieved in a framework that recognizes lexical constructions at the level of the verb sense, showing that each meaning correlates with encoding features (ranging from morpho-syntactic to semantic, discursive, and lexical ones) that are not predictable, or at best are only partially motivated. Through extensive corpus analysis, we identify such significant, frequency-based patterns of correlation, each of which represents a lexical construction. Our data thus argue strongly for an approach to polysemy in which individual meanings are represented as enriched lexical constructions, which include morphological and discursive specifications (in addition to standard valence information).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Data and methodology
- 3.Lexical meaning in constructional contexts: Ancient Greek baínō
- 3.1
Baínō in Homer
- 3.1.1The ‘go somewhere’ construction
- 3.1.2The ‘leave’ construction
- 3.1.3The ‘mount/climb’ construction
- 3.1.4The inchoative ‘start/ set out’ construction
- 3.1.5The ‘make go’ construction
- 3.2
Baínō in Εuripides
- 3.2.1The ‘go’ and ‘come’ constructions
- 3.2.2The ‘die’ construction
- 3.2.3The ‘leave’ construction
- 3.3
Baínō in Plato
- 3.3.1The ‘stand (on)’ construction
- 3.3.2The ‘overstep’ construction
- 3.1
Baínō in Homer
- 4.Lexical meaning in constructional contexts: Sahidic Coptic bôk
- 4.1The ‘go’ construction
- 4.2The ‘go away’ construction
- 4.3The progressive ‘be on the way’ construction
- 4.4The ‘went and did’ construction
- 4.5The ‘go-do’ construction
- 5.Idiosyncrasy and predictability in lexical patterns: Discussion and conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- List of glosses used in Coptic and Greek examples that are not included in Leipzig Glossing Rules 2015 (https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/Glossing-Rules.pdf)
-
References
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.18047.geo
References
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