To identify the central sense of motion verbs using specific criteria. â To provide a ... between the two languages, as reflected in the language of motion. 3 ...
THE 13TH INTERNATIONAL COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE THEME SESSION: ‘THE EMBODIED BASIS OF CONSTRUCTIONS IN GREEK AND LATIN’ NEWCASTLE, 24 JULY 2015
On the encoding of motion events in Ancient Greek: Towards a constructional analysis THANASIS GEORGAKOPOULOS
Freie Universität Berlin, Excellence Cluster Topoi ANNA PIATA
National & Kapodistrian University of Athens
KIKI NIKIFORIDOU National & Kapodistrian University of Athens
The Research Project “Motion verbs in Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian: A diachronic study on the linguistic, cognitive and cultural encoding of space”
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The Research Project • General aims: – To shed light on the encoding of motion events in Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian by putting forward a corpus-based, diachronic study of motion verbs – To identify the central sense of motion verbs using specific criteria – To provide a plausible route of the semantic change that motion verbs undergo in the later stages – To address the cognitive underpinnings in and cultural differences between the two languages, as reflected in the language of motion.
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Our talk • We focus on: -The manner of motion verb βαίνω (baínō;‘walk, step’) - Arguing that:
- lexical polysemy in general inheres in a particular constructional environment - the rise of extended metaphorical uses as well correlates with particular syntactico-semantic features
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Construction Grammar • Construction Grammar (CxG) is a usage-based, nonderivational theory that considers grammatical constructions as the basic unit of analysis • Grammatical constructions are conventionalized pairings of meaning and form (see, e.g., Fillmore, Kay & O’Connor 1988, Goldberg 1995, Kay & Fillmore 1999, Michaelis & Lambrecht 1996, Fried & Östman 2004; for an overview see Nikiforidou 2009, Fried to appear)
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The Morphology-Syntax Continuum – morphemes and monomorphemic words – to complex and compound words – to completely substantive/lexically-filled idioms – to (semi)substantive patterns (blow one’s nose) – to (semi)schematic idioms (the Xer, theYer) – to regular grammatical patterns requiring specific subsets of lexical material (e.g. a set of verbs fitting the ditransitive construction) – to completely schematic patterns (the subject-predicate construction)
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Why Construction Grammar for AG motion verbs? • Motion events in AG have been widely investigated from either a semantic or syntactic (see Skopeteas 2002, Skopeteas 2008a, 2008b, Nikitina 2013, Nikitina & Maslov 2013) • By adopting a constructional perspective, we expect to arrive at holistic (as usage events) descriptions of baínō where particular senses arise in particular syntactic configurations
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Ancient Greek motion events Motion verb: Deixis
Preposition + Case: Path
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Ancient Greek motion events Prefix: Path
Motion verb: Manner
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Ancient Greek motion events
suffix: Path
Motion verb: Manner
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Typological profile of Ancient Greek • Homeric and Classical Greek: Satellite-framed pattern (see Skopeteas 2002; Imbert 2010; Nikitina 2013; cf. Verkerk 2014) Satellite-framed language
Manner Verb + Path Satellite (a suffix, a prefix, a preposition, a case)
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Case study: βαίνω (baínō) Manner verb baínō (usually transl. ‘walk’, ‘step’)
Senses of baínō in Iliad 180
We discuss its behavior in Homer as well as the diachronic development of these senses for which there is evidence in later stages Homeric Greek Author: Homer Text: Iliad Date: ≈8th c. B.C. Text Type: Epic poetry N: 111T words
160
140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0
Spatial
Metaphorical
Classical Greek Euripides: (5th c. B.C.) Herodotus: (5th c. B.C.) 12
Distribution of senses in Homer Senses of baínō in Homer 120 100 80
60 40 20 0
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Constructional schema for baínō
Figure: Intransitive motion construction for baínō (cf. Goldberg 1995; Stefanowitsch 2013)
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From ‘walking’ to ‘standing’ • In Euripides, we find baínō with the meaning ‘stand’ (literally standing). This sense correlates with particular features:
Present Perfect
Animate subjects 15
From ‘walking’ to ‘standing’: Some remarks •
The Present Perfect meaning is highly compatible with this particular sense of baínō : it profiles a bound which coincides with the moment of arrival •
•
This sense of baínō focuses on the endpoint of the process, hence the end of motion/standing •
•
cf. Bentein (2012): “subject-oriented resultative perfect”
While this provides a motivation for the attraction of this sense to the present perfect morphology, this is by no means an inevitable correlation; the standing sense, for example, could have remained a function of the present.
This sense arises from the literal sense by virtue of metonymy: •
‘walk’ foregrounds motion while ‘stand’ foregrounds the end of motion 16
From ‘standing’ to ‘being established’
Inanimate Figures (nouns) Present perfect participial form
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From ‘standing’ to ‘being established’
Metaphorical motivation: BEING ESTABLISHED IS STANDING IN A PARTICULAR LOCATION18
Another sense: ‘mount’ • Another sense of baínō that appears in a very specific context is that of ‘mount’ – This requires a complement-specific template, referring to horses and chariots
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The construction: • baínō + future participle: Sense ⇒Purpose
• Deprofiling of manner of motion • It generalizes its sense to ‘going’(cf. Eng.“going to”) • The extension does not go all the way as is the case with “going to” in the sense that the subject has to be human 20
The construction:
• see also ágō ‘lead’, pémpō ‘send’, propémpō ‘send before’, sugkalô ‘call to council’
• The combination could be described as a construction in its own right
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The construction: < baínō + infinitive>
baínō + infinitive:
‘set out to, start’ •
The constructional features for this sense are: •
Infinitival complement of particular verbs that can be semantically defined (érkhomai/ eîmi (‘come, go’), théō (‘run’), elaúnō ‘set in motion’)
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Verb tense: Aorist
– This use may qualify as an “inflectional island” in the sense of Newman & Rice (2006); a specific meaning can inhere in a particular form of the verb (in our case, a particular tense)
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Concluding remarks • The senses of baínō cannot be determined independently of the constructional environment • These constructional patterns are of two types: – fairly schematic patterns (e.g., motion verb + infinitive) – verb-based specific (item-based in Croft’s 2001 terms) patterns (e.g., baínō + horses and chariots) • That is, these constructional environments contain grammatically defined/ productive slots and lexical substantive slots and these are precisely the patterns that are only recognized in constructional frameworks
• Lexical polysemy and constructional analyses are not contradictory – … dominant trend in lexical semantics currently is the shift of focus “from words as building blocks to usage events, in all their contextual detail” (cf. Cuyckens et al. 2003: 21). 23
Ongoing work • Expanding the data set – More (types of) verbs: • Directional verbs: eîmi/ érkhomai (‘come, go’)
• Caused motion verbs: bállō (‘put, throw’)
• Include more text types in both Classical and Post-classical Greek, thus enabling a diachronic study in the semantics of the verbs under investigation – Examine whether text-type/genre features correlate with particular senses of these verbs 24
References Bentein, Klaas. 2012. The periphrastic perfect in Ancient Greek. A diachronic mental space analysis. Transactions of the Philological Society 110(2), 171-211.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Croft, William & Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge. Cuyckens, Hubert, Thomas Berg, René Dirven & Klaus-Uwe Panther. 2003. Motivation in language: Studies in honor of Günter Radden. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fillmore, Charles, Paul Kay & Mary Catherine O’ Connor. 1988. Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: the case of let alone. Language 64,: 501-38. Fried, Mirjam. to appear. Construction grammar. In: Artemis Alexiadou and Tibor Kiss (eds.), Handbook of syntax (2nd ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Fried, Mirjam & Jan-Ola Östman (eds.). 2004. Construction grammar in a cross-language perspective. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gries, Stefan Th. 2006. Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: The many meanings of to run. In Stefan Th. Gries & Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in cognitive linguistics: corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis, 57-99. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Imbert, Caroline. 2010. Multiple preverbation in Homeric Greek: A typological insight. In Unison in multiplicity: Cognitive and typological perspectives on grammar and lexis. CogniTextes 4.
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References Kay, Paul & Charles, Fillmore. 1999. Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The what's X doing Y? construction. Language 75, 1-33. Kay, Paul & Laura A. Michaelis. 2012. Constructional meaning and compositionality. In C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger and P. Portner (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning (vol. 3), 2271-2296. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lehmann, Christian. 2012. Converse categorization strategies. Linguistics 50(3), 467–494. Michaelis, L. & Knud, Lambrecht. 1996. Toward a construction-based theory of language function: The case of nominal extraposition. Language 72, 215-47. Newman, John & Sally Rice. 2006. Transitivity schemas of English EAT and DRINK in the BNC. In S. Th. Gries & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in cognitive linguistics: Corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis, 225-260. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Nikiforidou, Vassiliki. 2009. Constructional analysis. In: Frank Brisard, Jan-Ola Őstman & Jef Verschueren (eds.), Grammar, meaning and pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights 5], 16-32. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nikitina, Tatiana & Boris Maslov. 2013. Redefining constructio praegnans: On the variation between allative and locative expressions in Ancient Greek. Journal of Greek Linguistics 13(1), 105-142. Nikitina, Tatiana. 2013. Lexical splits in the encoding of motion events from Archaic to Classical Greek. In: Goschler, Juliana and Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.), Variation and Change in the Encoding of Motion Events, 185–202. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 26
References Skopeteas, Stavros. 2002. Lokale Konstruktionen im Griechischen: Sprachwandel in funktionaler Sicht. Doctoral dissertation, University of Erfurt. Skopeteas, Stavros. 2008a. Grammaticalization and sets of form-function pairs: Encoding spatial concepts in Greek. In: Verhoeven, Elizabeth, Stavros Skopeteas,Yong-Min Shin,Yoko Nishina and Johannes Helmbrecht (eds.), Studies on Grammaticalization, 25-56. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Skopeteas, Stavros. 2008b. Encoding spatial relations: language typology and diachronic change in Greek. Language Typology and Universals 61(1), 54-66. Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2013. Variation and change in English path verbs and constructions: Usage patterns and conceptual structure. In Goschler, Juliana & Anatol Stefanowitsch(eds.),Variation and change in the encoding of motion events, 223-244. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stolova, Natalya. 2015. Cognitive Linguistics and Lexical Change: MotionVerbs from Latin to Romance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Stolz, Thomas, Lestrade, Sander & Stoltz, Christel. 2014. The crosslinguistics of zero-marking of spatial relations. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics, vol. II:Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Verkerk, Annemarie. 2014. The evolutionary dynamics of motion event encoding. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen. 27
The Research Project • Members of the Research Project: • • • • • • • •
Kiki Nikiforidou Sophia Marmaridou Dimitra Katis Anna Piata Thanasis Georgakopoulos Frank Kammerzell Eliese-Sophia Lincke Daniel Werning
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