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Space in Diachrony
Edited by Silvia Luraghi, Tatiana Nikitina and Chiara Zanchi
[Studies in Language Companion Series 188] 2017
► pp. 95–118

How should a “classical” Satellite-Framed Language behave?

Path encoding asymmetries in Ancient Greek and Latin

| University of Salerno, Italy
| University of Salerno, Italy
| University of Salerno, Italy
| University of Salerno, Italy

This paper discusses the encoding of motion events in a corpus of Ancient Greek and Latin texts, focusing on the differences in the expression of Sources and Goals in the two languages (both classified as Satellite-Framed in Talmy’s typology). For this analysis, we have adopted a number of parameters suitable for the investigation of Source and Goal encoding in Path expressions. The corpus has been manually tagged with the help of a software tool dedicated to motion event annotation (Modeg). The results of the analysis confirm the widespread tendency to express Goal more frequently and in a more detailed way compared to Source, and reveal subtle differences in the way in which Ancient Greek and Latin combine prepositional marking with directional preverbs. We argue that the common tendency to express simple Paths (mostly Goal-oriented) can be interpreted from a diachronic perspective as one of the main factors enhancing the diachronic change of both languages towards the preference for the Verb-Framed type of encoding.

Keywords: Source–Goal asymmetry, Greek, Latin, motion events, path encoding, typological change
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus and methodology
  • 3.Path asymmetry meets Path complexity
    • 3.1The main loci of Source and Goal encoding and their frequency in Ancient Greek and Latin
    • 3.2Semantic granularity of Source and Goal markers
    • 3.3Cooptation of locative expressions for the encoding of Goal and Source
  • 4.Possible development lines towards the Verb-Framed type
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.188.04iac
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