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Space in Diachrony
Edited by Silvia Luraghi, Tatiana Nikitina and Chiara Zanchi
[Studies in Language Companion Series 188] 2017
► pp. 67–94

Ablative and allative marking of static locations

A historical perspective

| CNRS (LLACAN)

The study addresses the diachronic relationship between locative marking and the marking of goals and sources of motion. In ancient Indo-European languages, and in some modern ones, static spatial relations can be described by means of inherently dynamic expressions, which are normally used for encoding Goals and Sources (as in to the left of the door). I suggest that this strategy presents an alternative to the use of rich systems of spatial prepositions specialized for encoding particular configurations. Its use pre-dates the development of basic spatial prepositions, which came to replace, in Indo-European languages, directional adverbs (sometimes also described as particles). The directional adverbs played a prominent role in the encoding of spatial notions in ancient languages. After they were reanalyzed as spatial prepositions and verbal prefixes, the directional strategy continued to be used for the expression of peripheral spatial meanings, for which no prepositional expression had developed. I illustrate this phenomenon with data from Ancient Greek and Modern Russian, and discuss how it can explain the data commonly described by the somewhat mysterious term “ablative-locative transfer”.

Keywords: ablative-locative transfer, access path, directional adverbs, right/left, Ancient Greek, Russian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Static spatial relators vs. access paths
  • 3.Etymology of spatial prepositions
  • 4.Motion-based strategies in ancient languages
  • 5.Access paths in modern languages
    • 5.1Lexical restrictions
    • 5.2Access paths in Russian: ‘left’ and ‘right’
    • 5.3Access paths in Russian: Cardinal directions
    • 5.4Summary of the Russian data
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
  • Online resources
Published online: 14 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.188.03nik
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Online resources

The British National Corpus (BNC)
[URL]〉
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
[URL]〉
The Perseus Digital Library
[URL]〉
The Russian National Corpus
[URL]〉
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG)
[URL]〉
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

De Pasquale, Noemi
2021. ‘Invisible’ spatial meaning: a text-based study of covert Path encoding in Ancient Greek. Folia Linguistica 55:2 ► pp. 485 ff. DOI logo
De Pasquale, Noemi
2021. ‘Invisible’ spatial meaning: a text-based study of covert Path encoding in Ancient Greek. Folia Linguistica 55:2 ► pp. 485 ff. DOI logo
Georgakopoulos, Thanasis
2018. A frame-based approach to the source-goal asymmetry. Constructions and Frames 10:1 ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Nikitina, Tatiana
2018. Frames of reference in discourse: Spatial descriptions in Bashkir (Turkic) . Cognitive Linguistics 29:3 ► pp. 495 ff. DOI logo

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