Greek Prepositions: From Antiquity to the Present

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Greek Prepositions

for Sandra

Greek Prepositions from Antiquity to the Present PIETRO BORTONE

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Pietro Bortone 2010 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2009935885 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–955685–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents Acknowledgements Foreword

Part I. Background to Greek prepositions

vi vii

1

1 On the function of prepositions 1.1 Prepositions and related items 1.2 Prepositions and postpositions 1.3 Adpositions and cases 1.4 Adpositions with cases 1.5 Prepositions and cases as synsemantic expressions 1.6 Compound prepositions 1.7 The structure of prepositional phrases

3 3 4 6 16 20 25 27

2 On the meaning of prepositions 2.1 The meaning(lessness) of cases 2.2 The meaning(lessness) of prepositions 2.3 The polysemy of cases and prepositions 2.4 Contiguity of meanings 2.5 The role of spatial meanings 2.6 Language acquisition and development 2.7 Temporal and other meanings 2.8 Examples of spatial metaphors 2.9 Explaining polysemy 2.10 Parallel and different metaphorizations 2.11 Additional factors affecting prepositional meaning 2.12 The ex silentio argument for spatial primacy 2.13 The direction of semantic change 2.14 Does diachrony corroborate the localistic hypothesis?

33 33 35 41 43 47 53 57 62 71 75 78 81 82 84

3 On the development of prepositions 3.1 Cases and adpositions 3.2 Sources for prepositions 3.3 Nouns as a source for adpositions 3.4 Types of nouns that become adpositions

86 86 89 93 101

vi

Contents 3.4.1 Parts of the body 3.4.2 Environmental terms 3.4.3 Object parts

101 102 104

Part II. The history of Greek prepositions

107

4 Prepositions and cases in Ancient Greek 4.1 Greek in this study 4.2 The Classical Greek case system 4.3 The prepositional syntagms of Classical Greek 4.4 The differences from prefixes 4.5 The extent of prepositional use in Classical Greek 4.6 Pre-Classical insights: the Greek of Homer 4.7 Case usage in Homer 4.7.1 Accusative 4.7.2 Genitive 4.7.3 Dative 4.7.4 Adverbial cases 4.7.5 The -çØ case 4.8 The Classical Greek prepositions in Homer 4.8.1 Inventory 4.8.2 Government 4.8.3 Compounding 4.8.4 Meaning 4.9 The syntax of Greek adpositions in Homer 4.10 Before Homer 4.11 Main synchronic characteristics of the Ancient Greek system 4.11.1 The choice of case in PPs depended on the semantics of the case 4.11.2 Many prepositions show synonymy - especially in non-spatial senses 4.11.3 Some prepositions can be followed by [P+case] instead of just case 4.11.4 Prepositions with similar spatial sense are often alike in other meanings 4.12 Main diachronic trends of the Ancient Greek system 4.12.1 From prehistoric times, cases show a tendency to merge 4.12.2 Furthermore, the dative appears to be on the wane

109 109 110 115 119 121 123 124 124 125 128 128 130 131 131 131 131 132 133 140 143 143 147 149 150 153 153 154

Contents 4.12.3 The use of other plain oblique cases for spatial relation decreases 4.12.4 The use of all plain oblique cases also decreases in verb phrases 4.12.5 The semantic differences between cases used after a preposition are lost 4.12.6 More adverbs develop prepositional use 4.12.7 Fine semantic differences between many pairs of spatial prepositions fade 4.12.8 Ablative meanings show particular weakness 4.13 Contrasting the semantics of synonymous “proper” prepositions 4.14 Contrasting the semantics of “proper” and “improper” synonyms 5 Prepositions and cases in Hellenistic Greek 5.1 Late Ancient Greek: the Koine´ and its problems 5.2 The plausibility of Biblical Greek 5.3 The influence of Biblical Greek 5.4 Prepositional and case usage in Biblical Greek 5.4.1 There is a visible increase in prepositional use 5.4.2 There is a marked increase in the use of the “improper” prepositions 5.4.3 There is a reduction in the use of the dative 5.4.4 The number of cases governed by prepositions tends to be reduced 5.4.5 The meaning of the case governed by a preposition fades 5.4.6 It becomes clear that some prepositions are falling out of use 5.4.7 There are a few new (“improper”) prepositions 5.4.8 Many such “newer” prepositions seem to be used only in a local sense 5.4.9 There are improper prepositions that are combined with a simplex preposition, and then followed by plain case 5.4.10 Developments seen in the Koine´ are not always in line with later Greek 5.5 Synopsis of trends in the Koine´ 6 Prepositions and cases in Medieval Greek 6.1 Problems with Medieval Greek

vii 155 155 156 160 160 165 166 169 171 171 173 175 177 179 180 181 183 183 184 187 188 191 192 194 195 195

viii

Contents

6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8

The choice of Medieval Greek texts The cases and their recession The revolution in case government Medieval prepositional usage One addition to the inventory—or not General observations Semantic mergers 6.8.1 K ¼ æþaccusative ¼ K ¼ N 6.8.2 KŒþgenitive ¼ rBþgenitive ¼ Iþgenitive (¼ Ærþgenitive) 6.9 Phonetic mergers 6.10 Losses and births amongst the new 6.11 Sound changes 6.12 Parallels in neighbouring languages and their possible influence 6.13 The compounding of prepositions 6.14 Which combinations are compounds? 6.15 The “improper” prepositions in Medieval Greek 6.16 The exceptions 6.17 The older prepositions in Medieval Greek 6.17.1 Group Æ 6.17.2 Group 6.17.3 Group ª 6.17.4 Summary 6.18 Something new in the old 7 Prepositions and cases in Modern Greek 7.1 Problems with Modern Greek 7.2 Trouble with the neighbours 7.3 Cases in Modern Greek 7.4 The Modern Greek prepositional inventory 7.5 The compound prepositions today 7.6 Compound prepositions allowing a single combination 7.7 Compound prepositions with contrastive combinations 7.8 Semantic innovations in the compound prepositions 7.8.1 I ÆØ 7.8.2 I Æ 7.8.3 ªæfiø 7.8.4 KØÆ

197 202 203 205 206 208 208 209 210 212 214 215 215 218 221 222 225 227 231 232 233 234 235 238 238 240 245 254 264 267 272 278 278 279 279 279

Contents 7.8.5 ø 7.8.6 KŒ 7.8.7 Œø 7.8.8 Œ 7.8.9 ÆÇ 7.8.10 ÆŒæØ 7.8.11

Æ 7.8.12 æ 7.8.13 ø 7.8.14 Discussion 7.9 Today’s usage of the simplex prepositions 7.9.1 I 7.9.2

7.9.3 ªØ 7.9.4

7.9.5 æ 7.9.6 7.9.7 åøæ 7.9.8 ‰ 7.9.9 ŒÆ 7.10 Simplex prepositions revived productively by purism 7.10.1 I 7.10.2 7.10.3 åæØ 7.10.4 Ææ 7.10.5 æ 7.11 Simplex prepositions revived less productively by purism 7.11.1 K þ genitive ‘during the government/rule of ’ 7.11.2 ŒÆ þ accusative 7.11.3 ŒÆa c ØæŒØÆ (þ genitive) 7.11.4 I 7.11.5 N (in this form, not as ) 7.11.6 KŒ 7.11.7 K 7.11.8 KÆ 7.11.9 K 7.11.10 ŒÆ þ genitive 7.11.11 æ

ix 279 280 280 280 281 281 281 282 282 282 283 284 285 285 286 287 287 288 288 288 289 290 290 291 291 292 292 292 293 293 294 294 295 295 296 296 297 297

x

Contents 7.11.12 æ 7.11.13 æ 7.11.14 7.12 Simplex prepositions revived in fossilized phrases

Epilogue References Index

298 299 299 300 302 304 337

Acknowledgements For lack of guidance people fall: salvation [lies] in the multiplicity of advisors. (Prov. 11:14)

Many people have been of help in my work for this book, and I would like to express my gratitude towards them. Although I bear sole responsibility for the end result, I wish to acknowledge corrections, explanations, and support I received from different sources. I want to thank above all Anna MorpurgoDavies, Eirene Philippaki-Warburton, Peter Mackridge, and Jim Miller for corrections to the doctoral thesis on which this book is mostly based. I am also indebted to Elizabeth Jeffreys for suggestions on setting up my corpus of Medieval Greek texts, to Gillian Ramchand and Sandra Paoli for feedback on syntactic questions, and to Philomen Probert for elucidations an accentuation issues. I am very thankful to the Dumbarton Oaks institute of Harvard for a fellowship in the summer of 2003, that enabled me to carry out further checkings of Medieval texts and enjoy their wonderful facilities. I wish also to thank six native Modern Greek speakers for vetting all my Modern Greek examples, and amongst these Emmanuel Papoutsakis in particular. My gratitude also goes to Peter Starr and Nefeli Papoutsaki for providing significant help with Arabic and with German secondary literature, and to Jonathan Miller of the Oxford University Computing Service, who steered me through computer problems with extraordinary kindness and expertise. I also appreciate the input provided by two anonymous readers who appraised a draft of the book for Oxford University Press. Special thanks, finally, are due to Andrew Farlow for his late-hours help quemvis efferre laborem suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas.

Foreword This book traces the evolution of the Greek prepositional system in its entire history (which had never been done before), and assesses what general trends, if any, emerge from it. The aim is not to formulate an abstract theory, nor to describe Greek usage strictly within a preconceived theoretical framework, but to present a philological compte-rendu with data-driven observations. The most important of these, perhaps, is that the history of Greek prepositions, if analysed in its entirety, is largely congruent with the “localistic hypothesis” that concrete spatial meanings are the earliest ones, and entirely congruent with the “unidirectionality hypothesis” that spatial meanings evolve into non-spatial ones but not vice-versa. The conjecture that cases and prepositional phrases start their life with spatial meanings is very old, has been declared plausible by many, and has been documented in sporadic cases—but not on as large a scale as can be seen here. Similarly, the idea that prepositional meaning can only change from spatial to “abstract” needed to be tested systematically on a language for which we have exceptionally extensive historical evidence; Greek, owing to its extraordinarily long history—the longest attested history of any IndoEuropean language—is an ideal and fruitful choice. Although Greek offers a unique testing ground for historical linguistics, as well as being the vehicle of one of the highest literary traditions, very few are the aspects of the Greek language whose diachrony has been studied from the ancient to the modern period. There are very many books on the Ancient Greek prepositional system, benefitting from the findings provided by centuries of previous classical scholarship, but they never go beyond the Hellenistic period. They therefore leave almost two millennia of the history of the language unchartered. For that time period, pre-existing research on prepositions is almost non-existent, so that fresh textual work, in-depth familiarity with Medieval and Modern Greek, and at least a glance at other Balkan languages, are required. It is the contention of this book that only if the whole history of Greek, especially of the latter periods, is taken into consideration, a fundamental mechanism behind the Greek prepositional system becomes apparent, and a remarkable picture emerges. And if the diachrony of Greek has a lot to say about prepositions, prepositions have a lot to say about the diachrony of Greek. Prepositions are an

Foreword

xiii

extraordinary category, for in their diachrony the whole history of the Greek language is reflected: the changes in the phonology, the morphology, the syntax, the semantics, the lexicon, as well as social and political aspects. Everything plays its role and is interconnected in the history of Greek prepositions: the tendency to elide initial unstressed vowels, the disappearance of the dative, the shift towards analysis, the loss of the rest/goal distinction, the increasing polysemy, the effect of purism, and the influence of neighbouring or ruling peoples: prepositions are a microcosm of Greek at large. The book is divided into two sections: an introductory part providing a basic background to the form, the semantics, and the history of prepositions in general (Chapters 1, 2, and 3 respectively); and a main part providing a detailed analysis of the Greek prepositional system in ancient, in Hellenistic, in medieval, and in modern times, with synchronic snapshots and diachronic observation (Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 respectively). Chapter 1 broadly identifies the objects of the ensuing enquiry. It considers which structures are prepositional phrases, and which linguistic items constitute prepositions. It argues that there are functional parallels between (local) adverbs, case inflexion/affixes, post-/prepositions, combinations of adpositions with cases, and combinations of (local) adverbs with prepositions. All these items, at least in some of their uses, can therefore be taken as being equivalent to the more prototypical prepositions. This leads also to the conclusion that we do not need to give much weight to the distinctions traditionally drawn between the “proper” and “improper” prepositions of Ancient Greek (e.g. KŒ vs. ø), or between the simple and compound prepositions of Modern Greek (e.g. I vs. ø I). Chapter 2 looks, more extensively, at adpositional (and case) meaning. Many scholars stated that prepositions, cases, and equivalent elements have a mere relational function and are inherently meaningless; the multiple and unpredictable meanings of prepositions and cases are often highlighted as proof. Considering the varying degrees of meaningfulness of case forms, from semantic emptiness to extreme polysemy, it can however be argued that polysemy is not unprincipled—there are clear and demonstrable links between, for example, locative, comitative, and instrumental/modal meanings. The “localistic” interpretation of this is that the various non-spatial senses of cases or adpositions are related in a chain of semantic extensions which starts from a spatial notion. What is the evidence for such a hypothesis? Some synchronic evidence is provided by research in psychology and philosophy: studies in language acquisition show that spatial relations are the first to be

xiv

Foreword

learnt. The idea that mental concepts (and knowledge in general) must be originally derived by sensory sources—from our visual or tactile perception of the space around us and of what it contains—has been accepted by many scientists and, long before, it has been endorsed by many philosophers. Furthermore, there is a range of cross-linguistic evidence supporting an interpretation of human language (and human cognition in general) as based on our subjective, human experience of the world. Thus, instead of assuming that polysemy is random, we should ask why it should exist at all, and why common and basic notions such as agency do not have their own adposition or case. We can see polysemy as a principled sequence—in line, for instance, with the Cognitive Linguistics school. A concrete spatial notion can be seen—along the lines of Prototype Theory—seen as the semantic starting point, with subsequent grafting of the structure of the spatial semantic field onto abstract domains. Chapter 3 considers the historical development of adpositions. It also presents the clear but scattered evidence for a “localistic” interpretation that can be collected from different language families: we can see cases being born from postpositions, which may explain why prepositions, usually have more “concrete” meanings than cases: perhaps it is just that prepositions are “younger” than cases. Adpositions, in turn, come from adverbs, and adverbs often derive from nouns. Adpositions can also develop from verbs, adjectives, or more complex phrases—and can even be loanwords. There are reasons for being at least aware of all this before we move onto Greek. Furthermore, the development of an abstract meaning from a spatial one is attested in important and common prepositional uses, such as expressions of possession and of existence. All this evidence is intriguing but still anecdotal and far from systematic. This is where Greek comes in. The second part of the book, tracing the history of Greek prepositions from the earliest evidence to the present day, begins with Chapter 4. Here Ancient Greek usage comes under scrutiny. The focus is prepositional and case usage in classical Attic-Ionic (the so-called “improper” prepositions being included), with two chronological excursions into earlier evidence. The Ancient Greek prepositional system was plentiful and increasingly rich in synonyms; old prepositions with similar spatial sense were often alike in their non-spatial meanings, which suggests that there was a logic to their polysemy. We see prepositions competing with one another (usually new “improper” ones ousting old “proper” synonyms), while the semantic contribution and the extent of use of cases was diminishing. Above all,

Foreword

xv

we see evidence that new “improper” adpositions tended to be mainly or exclusively spatial. In the pre-Classical Greek of Homer the local meanings of the cases are more discernible and more prevalent; the information drawn from Linear B, and from Proto-Indo-European as we reconstruct it, gives further credit to the conjecture that Greek prepositions started their life as local adverbs. Homeric Greek also shows adpositions and cases beginning to come together, and adpositions being combined. The problem, however, is that it is not possible to observe what kind of meaning the prepositions of Classical languages had at their birth, because our records do not stretch far enough back in time (one of the claims of this book, however, is that the history of Greek is long enough for us to find more telling evidence in later stages). Contrasting the semantics of the “proper” prepositions with the younger “improper” synonyms, we can see that the newer set was rarely non-spatial (especially at earlier stages, such as in Homer), and that the new prepositions whose birth is attested after the beginning of our records (like Œø) had only spatial senses—while their older counterparts (ŒÆ, ) had extensive non-spatial use. There are, on the other hand, a few “improper” prepositions that are only non-spatial in all their attested history. Chapter 5 focuses on Hellenistic (“Koine´”) Greek, examining usage in Biblical Greek—taking into account, as will also be necessary for later stages of the history of Greek, the influence of other languages. Koine´ Greek confirms an increase in the use of adpositions, of the “improper” ones in particular. The tendencies observed in Ancient Greek—newer prepositions being rarely non-spatial, the older ones being often non-spatial—in the Koine´ are even more distinct. Most significantly, in Hellenistic Greek there were new prepositions, and many were used only in a local sense; the older prepositions that were being replaced by new ones in spatial uses, on the other hand, were increasingly confined to non-spatial meanings. Koine´ Greek also shows that many older prepositions were becoming obsolete. Chapter 6 analyses usage in Medieval Greek—the least known period in the history of the language, and the most revealing. This is the period when the modern prepositional system took shape, and the old one was discarded. The influence of Classical and Biblical models is evident, and we take its interference into account. A close study of a selected corpus of texts approximating vernacular Greek provides a clear picture of prepositional and case usage. The accusative was gradually becoming the only (structural) case for nouns that were objects of prepositions; many synonyms in the old set of “proper” prepositions were dropping out of spoken use (I ç, I, K, ŒÆþgen., æ, æ, æ, , æ, —ousted also by the increasing use

xvi

Foreword

of the newer “improper” ones)—until only N, , I, ªØ, , åøæ, ‰ and some uses of ŒÆ remained. Amongst the “improper” items too there were losses, but also new arrivals, such as Œ and ÆÇ. It became increasingly common for prepositions (even some “proper” ones) to be compounded (Iø N, Id ªØ). Most importantly, the texts show that the use of the newer prepositions was almost exclusively spatial, and that the newest ones (e.g. ªæfiø) were purely spatial. Furthermore, according to the degree (if any at all) to which old prepositions had a new replacement, they were losing their old spatial sense, “transferred” onto the new item. If the old items developed new meanings, they could only be non-spatial ones. In other words, if old prepositions survived, they specialized in the non-spatial senses that their young counterparts could not express. In sum: new items attest that spatial senses were the first to appear, while the old items show that non-spatial senses were the last to be shed. Chapter 7 examines the prepositional system of Modern Greek, taking into account the profound impact of the learned tradition, whose style was, for a long time, even imposed by law in Greece, and the influence of the Balkan Sprachbund of which Greece is part. We see that the syntactic format of prepositions is now even more frequently that of “compound prepositions”. These are adverbial forms combined either with simplex prepositions or with weak pronouns in the genitive (the criterion for the choice of the simplex preposition being again in line with a localistic and human-centred interpretation, as it reflects the opposition between what is and what is not readily perceptible and available for interaction). When we assess the semantic innovations found in Modern Greek, we see that the development of the prepositional system has come full circle. On the one hand, the old prepositions still in use are now virtually only non-spatial, unless lacking a replacement; on the other hand, the younger (previously only spatial) prepositions now have also a range of non-spatial meanings—indeed, a few have lost their spatial meaning altogether, thus repeating in full the semantic cycle shown by the previous generation of prepositions. Greek thus testifies that among new prepositions spatial meanings are preponderant, are slowly extended to nonspatial notions and eventually disappear, transferred, as it were, onto new prepositions. This can be seen to occur with systematic regularity. In this book, non-English words and sentences used in the exemplification are normally translated; whenever it seemed useful, even quotations from secondary literature are given translations. Transliterations are provided (except when irrelevant to the discussion) for all non-Latin alphabets other than Greek, Hebrew, and Cyrillic. All translations, and all computer drawings are by the author.

Part I Background to Greek prepositions

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1 On the function of prepositions Æƒ ªºH

ÆØ N Å E N d . . . E I Ø Languages serve as evidence . . . for those who do not believe (I Cor. 14: 22)

To understand Greek prepositions and the analysis presented in the main body of this book, some basic background is in order. Let us begin with a look, in three successive chapters, at a few issues concerning, respectively, the function, the semantics, and the history of prepositions and of related items. Naturally, only questions and facts relevant to our main concern will be touched upon here, to help us contextualize the reasons for this study, and the significance of its results.

1.1 Prepositions and related items The terminology found in the literature to refer to case forms, postpositions, and prepositions, can be represented as shown in Figure 1.1. Case prefixes and infixes are not added to the list only because they are almost non-existent.1 pre-positions post-positions case suffixes case inflections or endings

adpositions

K case-forms

FIGURE 1.1

The use of K as an Oberbegriff, a non-phrasal category, is taken from Fillmore: 1 Only recently have some case prefixes, apparently, been found in the Mangarany language of north Australia (Lehmann 1995: 86). Adpositions may either precede or follow a noun phrase, but case forms almost always follow it. And the tendency towards suffixation instead of prefixation is not limited to case marking: there is an overwhelming preference for suffix morphology across languages, even in languages that on structural grounds we would predict to opt for prefixes (Cutler et al. 1985:

4

Background to Greek prepositions

prepositions, postpositions, and case affixes—semantically relevant or not—are all in fact realisations of the same underlying element, say K (for Kasus). (Fillmore 1968: 30)

The term K is not standard, but it corresponds, for instance, to the concept of “case signs” in Kracht (2002: 169–70) and of “case relations” or indeed “case” in Anderson (1971: 11, 2006b: 2, 52–3 et passim). Many linguists highlight the fact that the functions of cases are logically independent of whether their surface realization is by means of independent lexical items (pre- or postpositions), of word-order, or of endings (suffixes or inflections). The basic analogy between adpositions and case forms is even more obvious if we accept that “words” are sequences of morphemes and not per se grammatical entities (Julien 2007a), since syntax works with morphemes, and the output as words or affixes need not be regarded as stemming from a different syntactic representation. What is clear is that the various items listed above as manifestations of Kasus are, to a large degree, crosslinguistically equivalent— whether the comparison be between different languages or different stages in the history of one. Therefore, many considerations that can be made about one type of item can also be made about the others, even if the more specific terms cannot be jettisoned altogether, nor be always used indifferently because, as we shall see, in some languages some subtle differences exist. What we need to assess is to what extent these distinctions are relevant to Greek.

1.2 Prepositions and postpositions Pre-positions and post-positions do have a great deal in common, and the somewhat artificial term adpositions, which subsumes both, is very useful. In more casual speech, the term preposition is used also for postpositions, even if the term is originally a syntactic description. It was invented in Greek (as æŁ Ø “fore-placing”), by the grammarian Dionysus Thrax, who was the first to identify prepositions as a self-standing category; the term was rendered in Latin with prae-positio, and in most modern European languages with a

723). Only infixing is even less frequent. Psycholinguistic studies on lexical access indicate that word onsets are more salient than the rest of the word, and that the processing of stems is independent of that of prefixes and suffixes: stems are preferentially processed first, and need therefore to be ordered before affixes. Affixes, consequently, tend to be suffixes rather than prefixes. The development of case prefixes (presumably from prepositions) would take place in a language in which all modifiers and determiners follow the noun, so that prepositions should immediately precede it in all instances. Languages of this kind have not been reported (Kilby 1981: 121). Hebrew, for instance, has prefixed prepositions, undeniably bound forms, but they are not nominal case prefixes: they cliticize onto any first element in the NP, such as numerals and articles (cf. also Kahr 1976: 136–7).

On the function of prepositions

5

compound beginning with “fore-”, as in Russian ghtlju “fore-lay”, German Vorwort “fore-word”, Polish przyimek “fore-noun”, Dutch voorzetsel “fore-set”, Latvian prieva¯rds “fore-word”, Lithuanian prielin˜ksnis “fore-case”, Albanian parafjale¨ “fore-word”. But even in Estonian, a language characterized by postpositions, the term for a postposition is eessoña, which literally means “front-word”. Already in the sixteenth century Sanctius Brocensis (1587: 40) observed that praepositio etiam si postponatur non definit vocari praepositio, and the distinction between pre- and postpositions is commonly considered “trivial . . . mere pedantry” (Lyons 1968: 302ff.). It is indeed unnecessary for Greek, where postpositions were used only in the earliest stages of the language (cf. pp. 110–14). Observe also: (1.1)

German a nach meiner Meinung ‘in my view’ b meiner Meinung nach ‘in my view’

(1.2)

Estonian a moö¨da maad ‘on earth’ b maad moö¨da ‘on earth’

(1.3) English a your objections notwithstanding b notwithstanding your objections In some instances, however, adpositions can vary their meaning or syntax according to whether they precede or follow the noun. In Estonian itself, for instance (Haman 1962: 42): (1.4)

a u¨le ta¨nava ‘across the street’ b raamatu u¨le ‘about the book’

(1.5) a la¨bi linna ‘through the city’ b hooletuse la¨bi ‘owing to negligence’

6


The difference in meaning is not due to the context, as some “minimal pairs” indicate (examples from Raun and Saareste 1965: 30): (1.6) a selle peale ‘onto this’ b peale selle ‘in addition to this’ (1.7)

a u¨le maë ‘over the mountain’ b maë u¨le ‘concerning the mountain’

The difference, besides being semantic, can also be syntactic: there are a few German adpositions that can appear either before or after the noun, taking different cases accordingly (Fries 1991: 74): (1.8)

a entlang [dieses Weges] ‘along this way’ (preposition þ genitive) b [dem Weg] entlang ‘along this way’ (dative þ postposition).

1.3 Adpositions and cases Since adpositions mark a function of a noun, the category to which they are obviously closest is case forms. Given the interplay between the two in Greek, this is an issue worth discussing in some detail. The equivalence between inflections and adpositions as markers of a deeper notion of case was assumed by European grammarians as early as the sixteenth century. They observed the correspondence between the Latin case forms and the prepositions of their own languages. The Italian scholar Bembo (1525: 182ff.) called prepositions segni di caso, when referring to di “of ”, a “to”, and da “from”, perhaps because these correspond to Latin cases, and called other prepositions proponimenti, probably taking the Latin pro-pono as calque on the Greek æ-ŁÅ Ø, whence æŁ

Ø. Salviati (1586: 110ff.) referred to prepositions as the vicecasi, just as the pronouns were then called vicenomi. According to Moreux (1968: 31), ‘Les tours pre´positionnels jouent le meˆme roˆle que les cas. . . . Jusqu’ ici tout le monde est d’accord’. Linguists in recent decades have recognized that adpositions and cases are similar in function (cf. Lyons 1968: 302; Fillmore 1968: 29; Huddleston


7

and Pullum 2002: 601).2 Traditionally, however, the term “case” was used only in reference to a change in the form, typically at the end, of a noun, pronoun, or adjective, reflecting a change in grammatical function; but the category has, on closer inspection, proved hard to pin down (Butt 2006: 3– 8). In truth, the different morphosyntax does raise some issues;3 but cases and adpositions can be said to be functionally homologous, and a closer look at their morphology reveals further (at least historical) affinities. The use of adpositions and plain case suffixes in Estonian, given the exceptionally transparent morphology, shows this well. In Estonian one may either suffix a noun with a “local” case form, or attach the same suffix to another noun that is then used as an adposition, linked to the first noun by a genitive suffix. Thus “(on)to the roof ” can be expressed either as “to the roof ” or “to the head of the roof ” (data from Haman 1962): (1.9)

a katus-e pea-le roof-GEN head-ALLAT ‘onto the roof ’ b katuse-le roof-ALLAT ‘onto the roof ’

Likewise (1.10)

a katus-e pea-lt roof-GEN head-ABLAT ‘from the roof ’ b katuse-lt roof-ABLAT ‘from the roof’

Now, let us note the internal structure of these suffixed forms:

2 A distinction must be made between (a) case forms, also called case endings or case suffixes (according to segmentability), or case markers (then often including adpositions), or surface cases (by generativists), or just cases (with small-case initial), which constitute an inflectional or lexical category; and (b) case functions, in the literature referred to—with some differences—as case relations/case roles/deep cases/abstract cases or just Cases with capitalized initial, which are sets of semantic distinctions (semantic roles or theta roles being another name or a sub-distinction). 3 See Rauh (1993: 99), Do¨pke and Schwarze (1981: 19ff.). Comparative studies of Finnish and Swedish (Wande 1990: 223ff.) have even claimed that whether a language has cases or adpositions may affect, in a Sapir–Whorf way, the speakers’ conceptualization of space.

8


(1.11)

a katus-e-le NOUN-GEN-ALLATIVE b katus-e-lt NOUN-GEN-ABLATIVE

The allative and the ablative suffixes are added to an oblique form of the noun identical to the genitive. Indeed, if we look at the full declension of an Estonian singular noun (Haman 1962: 143, 174), we see that this is true of most cases (all hyphenation is added): Nominative Genitive # Illative Allative Inessive Adessive Elative Ablative Comitative Abessive Translative Terminative Essive

ven-d ‘brother’ ven-na ven-na-sse ven-na-le ven-na-s ven-na-l ven-na-st ven-na-lt ven-na-ga ven-na-ta ven-na-ks ven-na-ni ven-na-na

The diachrony of this surdećlinaison is also relevant to our enquiry and will be discussed later (pp. 86–8); what we need to notice here is the synchronic similarity between the internal structure of the inflected nouns and that of the postpositional phrases: PP = Case =

noun+GENITIVE + postposition: katus-e pealt noun+GENITIVE + case ending: katus-e-lt

The difference between case suffix and postposition therefore boils down only to bound/unbound status. Is that significant? No categorial distinction is made, for example, between the independent and even preposed article of some languages, and the suffixed article of other (even closely related) languages: Dutch French

de hond = le chien =

Danish Romanian

hund-en ‘the dog’ cıîne-le ‘the dog’


9

the two forms of the article can co-occur (as cases and adpositions can); in Swedish, the definite article is suffixed to the noun, but if a relative clause follows, it is preposed (in a different form, but the etymologies are synchronically irrelevant): bil-en ‘the car’ ta˚g-et ‘the train’

> den (bra) bil, som.… > det (fo¨rsta) ta˚g, som…

‘the (good) car which …’ ‘the (first) train which …’

Bound and unbound articles can even mark the same noun phrase: den ba¨ttre bil-en kostar mera ‘the better car costs more’ Here we see that a bound suffix, a separate preposed form, and a combination of the two can be grosso modo functionally equivalent—which is what we want to say about bound case suffixes/inflections and unbound adpositions. Many scholars who studied cases, nonetheless, thought that prepositions are extraneous to their subject: le syste`me des pre´positions reste par de´finition en dehors de notre engagement the prepositional system remains by definition outside of our concern. (Hjelmslev 1935: 135) das System der pra¨positionalen Fu¨gungen ist nicht mit der flektierenden Deklination zu verwechseln . . . die Bedeutung der Kasus und der Pra¨positionen . . . deutlich voneinander unterscheiden the system of prepositional arrangements is not to be confused with inflectional declensions . . . the meaning of the cases and that of the prepositions . . . are clearly distinct from each other. (Jakobson 1936: 245)

What are the differences? Kilby (1981: 104–9) said that distinguishing prepositions from cases in Russian, Latin, or German is easy, indicating the following as key distinguishing features: case affixes follow the head noun of an NP while prepositions precede it; prepositions, unlike cases, occur only once at the beginning of the NP and may not be repeated; cases express subject–object relations, while prepositions do not. The criteria indeed hold, at least in reference to languages referred to by Kilby (1981), particularly Russian; these differences, however, are often assumed to be universal: Rubio (1966: 168ff.) seems to be making statements of general application, when he dedicates a whole section of his treatise on Latin syntax to the contrast between prepositions and cases. His claims are, again, that Ps are a different category from cases because they are separable from the noun

10


while cases are not, and because Ps are not repeated while case must be. Lo´pez (1972: 82) echoes the claims with no reference to any specific language, and declares that Rubio identified the differences between cases and prepositions ‘con una agudeza extraordinaria’. A glance across languages, however, shows us that what are often assumed to be intrinsic characteristics of the category “adposition” (vs. bound case markers) are only the e´tat de langue of the more commonly known European languages. First, it is often stated that adpositions can be distinguished from cases by lack of agreement, for case affixes occur on all co-indexed words whereas adpositions appear only once (Kahr 1976: 111). This is incorrect, however, because bound case markers appearing after only one noun may also cover the other elements of the noun phrase, which are left unmarked: [Peter and Lucy]’s mother [the Duke of Edinburgh]’s residence [that guy you saw]’s name In Turkish, a single case marker can “cover” all nouns in an NP although appearing on one noun alone, and its bound status is confirmed by vowel harmony (its vowel conforms to the vowel of the last syllable of the word it is attached to): ‘in Greece and Turkey’ > ‘in Turkey and Greece’ >

Yunanistan ve Tu¨rkiye’de Tu¨rkiye ve Yunanistan’da

Languages of several different families mark case (and indeed other features) on the phrase rather than the word. One such language is Basque (Saltarelli 1988: 81): (1.12) etxe zahar house old SING-CASELESS SING-CASELESS ‘in large old houses’

haundi- etan big–in PLUR-LOCATIVE

There are also “intermediate” instances of languages which repeat case markers on each noun for some cases but not for others; besides Estonian, IndoEuropean languages such as Tocharian (p. 87) do so. And there are other phenomena which show that the use of case endings is not as systematic as it is often thought. In many languages, cases on the road to extinction are coordinated with different and only partly synonymous cases: in Latin, the obsolescent locative was colloquially coordinated with the ablative:

On the function of prepositions (1.13)

11

Antiochı¯ae . . . na¯tus est . . . celebrı¯ quondam ‘in Antiochia[LOC] he was born, a once famous[ABL] urbe (Cic. Arch. 3.4) city[ABL]’

In Ancient Greek, the obsolescent locative was conjoined with the dative: (1.14) I Łºø ŒAæı . . . ˇPºı Æfi ŒÆd ‘herald of contests at Olympia[DAT], ˝ Æfi Nemea[DAT]’

I Ł E Isthmus[LOC] and (Pi. N.IV 73ff.)

Secondly, there are instances of prepositions being repeated. In Russian itself (Mary MacRobert, p.c.), in folk poetry, and in the colloquial, prepositions also appear on the adjectives preceding or following the noun.4 Lastly, the third difference between cases and prepositions noted by Kilby (cases mark subjects and objects but adpositions do not) is not true of all languages. The Hebrew preposition ‘A /ey/, for example, is a preposition with synchronically virtually only grammatical sense,5 mostly marking definite direct objects. It is traditionally described as nota accusativi, although it may also mark the subject of a passive or intransitive verb (Saydon 1964: 195). It has cognates in Arabic, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Punic. Syriac too (Brown et al. 1906: 84b; Robinson 1962: 18) can mark the object with a preposition, L /l@/ (unrelated to Hebrew ‘A) which also has spatial meanings. In Hebrew, its cognate M /l@/ is also occasionally used as object marker (Gesenius et al. 1910: 366ff.). This use is also found in Ethiopic. Indo-European languages also have similar constructions: in Urdu, definite animate objects can be marked by the postposition ko “to/for”. Parallels also abound in Romance languages. While in Classical Latin the meanings of the preposition ad “at/to” were spatial or abstract but not syntactical (no Latin preposition had “grammatical” functions, such as the marking of subjects or direct objects), in colloquial

4 Biblical Greek has constructions such as ŒÆd åŁæÆ Ł ø Ima

m ı ŒÆd Ima

m B ªıÆØŒ, literally “and enmity I shall put between you and between the woman” (after the Hebrew original Ej AE PJBh x Q Jd ‘JA EB JAF in Genesis 3:15); here the preposition, which intrinsically entails a double referent object, occurs before both nouns; but this is less significant because the nouns are separated by a conjunction. 5 Just like the accusative case in Indo-European languages, ‘A /ey/ in Hebrew was occasionally the marker of the goal of motion (Ez. 21:25). Its origin is seen as deictic, since use sometimes resembles that of a demonstrative, in Classical as in Mishnaic Hebrew. Various etymologies of ‘A have been suggested—see e.g. Wright (1890: 112ff.). Scholars have no doubt it was a noun—cf. Gesenius et al. (1910: 362), Brown et al. (1906: 84b). On the development of adpositions, see Chapter 3.

12


Classical Latin ad had already started to mark the indirect object which standard Classical Latin marked with a plain case, the dative: (1.15) Classical hostibus exuvias dabit ‘He will give spoils to the enemies’ (1.16) Colloquial ad hostis exuvias dabit (Plaut. Epid. 38)

[PLAIN DATIVE]

[ad þ

ACCUSATIVE]

It is true that ad in Latin could never have marked the (traditionally termed) direct objects of verbs such as “see” or “call”, as the plain accusative did: (1.17) a Antonium non vidi ‘I have not seen Anthony’ b fratrem tuum clamavisti ‘you called your brother’

[PLAIN ACCUSATIVE] [PLAIN ACCUSATIVE]

but these sentences do correspond, in daughter languages, to: (1.18) Swiss Italian (Canton Grigioni) eu nun ha viss a To¨na hast clama` a teis frar (1.19)

(Rohlfs 1969: 8–9)

Spanish (standard) Yo no he visto a Tonõ has llamado a tu hermano

Thus the preposition ad (>a) has come to be used as object marker. This also shows the marking of the object as an extension of a spatial meaning. Another Latin spatial preposition, per, has had a similar evolution in Romanian: it still appears as a preposition (pe), with spatial and figurative meanings, but it has also come to be an object marker. The two sentences above translate as: (1.20)

Romanian a nu lam va˘zut pe Anton not him I have seen PE Anthony b lai chemat pe fratele ta˘u him you-have called PE brother-the your

Romanian grammarians, such as S¸tefa˘nescu-Dra˘ga˘nes¸ti and Murrel (1970: 131) insist that the object marker pe must be distinguished from the preposition pe. But that is unjustified: it is the same particle historically, and it is now


13

used both as a spatial preposition and as a syntactic marker without any morphological or phonological distinction. It should therefore also be regarded as the same particle synchronically.6 The same applies to the Spanish definite accusative marker a, commonly claimed to be “non-prepositional”— even by Langacker (1992: 302), a linguist sympathetic to a “localistic” view of cases. The assertion that prepositions are not really object markers like inflections or affixes is often based on the fact that object-marking prepositions also signal other features—typically definiteness or animacy. The best known example of this is the “prepositional accusative” we just saw, used in many varieties of Romance, although not in standard Italian and French. Semantically, its application is confined to objects that are definite and animate. Observe the use of the object-marking preposition in the Spanish rendering of ambiguous English sentences like “I want a friend” and “to elect the president”: deseo un amigo = any person, hitherto unknown, is wanted as a friend deseo a un amigo = a specific, known person, who is already a friend, is sought elegir el presidente = someone unspecified is being chosen for the post of president elegir al presidente = someone already president is elected to some other position Unrelated languages that employ prepositions to mark object status, such as the Hebrew ‘A /ey/ discussed earlier (p.11), have the same additional entailments. One might therefore suggest that object-marking adpositions are not semantically comparable to the accusative case of languages like Latin and Greek. 6 As Romanian pe shows, the three kinds of senses (local, metaphorical, and grammatical) are an ordered diachronic development, and can coexist synchronically. However, being historically a chain, it is to be expected that by the time the last type of meaning is developed, the first is being lost. This is indeed the case of Spanish, where a is no longer much used in its spatial meaning.

14


However, the traditionally accepted case-inflections of Latin or Greek declensions also carry multiple morphosyntactic features mapped onto a single morph: in addition to case, they mark gender, number, and originally (at least in part) animacy. If we attempt to segment the endings of languages like Latin into morphs, the result, as Lyons (1968: 189) noted, is ‘arbitrariness, inconsistency, and the proliferation of allomorphs’. The lack of isomorphism in the case forms is the very reason for the ancient system of handling inflection by ÆæÆª ÆÆ (cf. Matthews 1991: 186ff.). Moreover, even in agglutinative languages such as Turkish, in which, by definition, there is meant to be a one-to-one relation between morphs and morphemes, suffixes that mark syntactic functions such as object status express some additional connotation: just as Hebrew ‘A /ey/, Spanish a, or Romanian pe, the Turkish accusative marker suffix also indicates definiteness—an independent feature that other languages mark on the article (e.g. English) or on the verb (e.g. Hungarian). Thus, if the object is totally indefinite, in Turkish it appears in the same unmarked case as the subject—a case to which many Turkish grammars and linguists (e.g. Mardin 1961: 17; see also Bastuji 1976: 68) give the highly dubious label of nominative : (1.22) a bir kitap ¸cıktı one book exit-ed ‘a book came out’ b bir kitap okuyorum one book I-read ‘I am reading a book’ c kitap okuyorum book I-read ‘I am book-reading’ d bir kitabı okuyorum ACC . DEF ] I-read one book[ ‘I am reading a certain book’ e kitabı okuyorum book[ACC.DEF] I-read ‘I am reading the book’ Moreover, various markers (allomorphs) of the same case may differ as to which additional features they mark beside case. In Russian, for instance, we can identify two genitives for the same class of nouns—although most Russian grammars do not recognize this. The ending -/u/ seems to be used


15

only with reference to a part of a non-countable entity in a small set of nouns, whereas in the ending -/a/ this partitive nuance is not obligatory (Wierzbicka 1983: 248ff., whence the examples): xfirf xf˛ pfgf[ xfz

‘cup of tea’ ‘scent of tea’

(= containing some) (= belonging to)

One cannot dismiss this by postulating the existence in Russian of a separate partitive case: not only is a partitive meaning possible also for the -/a/ genitive, but both endings are regularly conjoined (Wierzbicka 1983: 250): ghbytcb xf˛ b bvjyflf

‘bring tea[-u] and lemonade[-a]’.

Therefore, both cases and prepositions, marking objects or other functions, may or may not have extra features. The third argument used to deny the equivalence between prepositions and cases bites the dust. One question remains: is there not (as Kilby and many other scholars suggested) a general tendency for cases to indicate syntactic meanings and for prepositions to express “concrete” ones? The answer is actually yes; both concrete and grammatical relations may be expressed by (1) word order, (2) bound morphs, and (3) adpositions; but concrete meanings are more likely to be expressed by inflections than by word order, and most likely by prepositions. Kilby was right about this; right also was Becker (1841: 212ff.), who felt that cases and prepositions differ insofar as cases indicate relation of action (Tha¨tigkeit) whereas prepositions indicate relations of space (Raum); and so was Kuryłowicz (1949: 147), when he emphasized that the “semantically empty” marking of syntactic roles (such as object) in Classical Arabic is done with cases (nom. -/u/, gen. -/i/, acc. -/a/) while concrete meanings are expressed by prepositions— even if, we should add, several Arabic verbs do govern prepositional phrases (PPs), and Arab grammarians regard them as ordinary transitive verbs (cf. e.g. Wright 1898: II:46). Right also were the many other linguists (e.g. Lyons 1968: 304, Lo´pez 1972: 83, Korponay 1986a: 116), who felt that cases tend to be more abstract and syntactic in meaning, while prepositions tend to be more spatial. Cases are usually fewer than prepositions; bound affixes are invariably a small set. In languages that have both case forms and adpositions, like Classical Greek, inflectional morphemes are likely to be employed to express relations that constitute a small set, such as grammatical ones, whereas the larger ranges of relations, such as local ones, are best realized by free morphemes (cf. Kilby 1981: 120). But although the diachronic reason for this is, as we shall see (p.88), highly consequential to our enquiry, in purely synchronic terms this is a nuance of little importance.

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1.4 Adpositions with cases Some languages (“analytical” languages) use only adpositions, other languages (“synthetic” languages) use cases; many languages (of “mixed typology”) use both adpositions and cases; moreover, quite a few, including Ancient Greek and Latin, use combinations of adpositions and cases. In many instances, a preposition is added to a case, “reinforcing” its meaning: (1.22) Latin a. eo [Romam] I go Rome-ACC ‘I go to Rome’

> eo [ad Romam] > I go to Rome-ACC

b. proficiscor [Roma¯] > proficiscor [ab Roma¯] I depart Rome-ABL > I depart from Rome-ABL ‘I leave Rome’ In Estonian, the abessive case (indicating distant position, absence, or lack) is increasingly “reinforced” semantically by a preposition (Haman 1962: 101ff.):7 so˜brata # ilma so˜brata

‘(without) friend[ABESSIVE]’ ‘without friend[ABESSIVE]’

In the same way, the Estonian terminative case (motion to a limited distance) can have the preposition kuni “as far as” added to it (Haman 1962: 141): (1.23)

(kuni) linna-ni on viis kilomeetrit to townTERMIN is five kilometres ‘it’s five kilometers (from here) to town’

In Estonian, the case expressing accompaniment can, similarly, take a synonymous adposition: (1.24) Estonian plain comitative > u¨hes or koos þ comitative The expression of a comitative meaning in many Indo-European languages has an analogous history:

7 It must be emphasized that when we characterize the meaning of particular forms (e.g. as comitative, instrumental, causal, etc.) we do not and cannot regard these labels as universal semantic primes, but purely as broad, context-based descriptions; these, at a theoretical level, may be further analysed as reflexes of other deeper (combinations of) semantic roles.

On the function of prepositions (1.25)

17

Tocharian sesa sa¨swampa ˙ PREPOS. NOUN-COMIT together sons-with ‘together with [her] sons’

Likewise, in Sanskrit (Coulson 2006: 49–50) the instrumental case, which also has comitative meaning, may have its comitative sense reinforced and indeed disambiguated by the postposition saha: (1.26) ba¯lair a¯gacchati > ba¯laiH saha a¯gacchati ‘he is coming with the children’ In Greek, too, we find that the comitative meaning of the dative case can be reinforced (or, more likely, disambiguated as comitative) by means of a preposition, : ¥Ø . . . N

f E ƒF Ø

‘going with horses’ ‘with the horsemen’

(Il. 16.683) (Xen.Cyr. 7.1.39)

In Latin, an accompaniment or an instrument was expressed by the ablative case, but increasingly by a combination of a comitative preposition and the ablative. The Latin ablative, by the Middle Ages, was no longer believed to have ever had a clear meaning on its own; Scioppius (1659: 28) stated that “omnis ablatiuus a sola praepositione expressa aut suppressa regitur”, maintaining that a preposition was ellipsed in phrases such as: gladio hunc jugulo

lit. ‘sword[ABL] him I kill’

The addition of the preposition cum here would also clarify that the meaning to be given to the ablative case is instrumental and not any of the other possible senses of the plain ablative case in Latin (locative, beneficiary, etc.). In general, if a language has both case forms and adpositions, the latter “normally exhibits finer distinctions” (Blake 1994: 11). Similarly, the ablative case of Turkish has, on its own, several possible meanings, including place whence, cause, and time since. The last sense is more clearly selected if a temporal postposition is added (cf. Bastuji 1976: 101): (1.27) a du¨nden yesterdayABL ‘since yesterday’

18

Background to Greek prepositions b du¨nden beri yesterdayABL þ POSTPOS ‘since’ ‘since yesterday’

It is, however, also possible for prepositions to be combined with a particular case for reasons that have little to do with semantics. A preposition may select a case owing to structural levelling: some trait prevalent in the overall casemarking system (typically, the generalized use of one given case with all adpositions) may cause adpositions to take a case that can appear semantically unjustified.8 A shift from semantically-motivated to syntactically-motivated case government occurred in the history of Greek, resulting in virtually all prepositions governing the accusative in Modern Greek. In Finnish, where there is an increasing tendency to use adpositions instead of plain cases, adpositions generally take the partitive case or, less commonly, the genitive. Thus, the plain abessive case is being replaced by a prepositional construction (as we saw earlier in Estonian), but in Finnish the preposition, instead of being just added to the abessive (which is what happens in Estonian), is preposed to the partitive: ‘without money’:

raha-tta > ‘money[ABESS]’

ilman ‘without

raha-a money[PART]’

In brief, a language has three basic options: (i) it may use plain case endings or suffixes with spatial meanings—as Turkish does; (ii) it may combine adpositions with various cases, a particular meaning being expressed by a particular combination—as in Latin;

8 To complicate the picture further, there is always the possibility of the influence of another language. This can be seen, for instance, in the Latin of Apuleius and of some Christian Latin authors: the cases governed by their (Latin) prepositions are not the ones Classical Latin requires, but the ones required in Greek by the corresponding prepositions (Szantyr 1965: 243–78):

CLASSICAL CONSTRUCTION ab þ ablative coram þ ablative post þ accusative ultra þ accusative usque þ accusative intus þ acc./ablat.

IMITATIVE CONSTRUCTION ab þ genitive coram þ genitive post þ genitive ultra þ genitive usque þ genitive intus þ genitive

GREEK SYNONYM MODEL I þ genitive æ Ł þ genitive O ø þ genitive æÆ þ genitive ø þ genitive K/Y ø þ genitive


19

(iii) it may just combine all its adpositions with one case, whose selection is syntactic rather than semantic—as happens in Hindi. One of the remarkable things about Greek, and its long history, is that within it (as we shall see in later chapters) we find all three systems at different times. Prepositions can also be added to other prepositions, in a process of semantic reinforcement parallel to the compounding of adpositions and cases. In Ancient Greek, comitative prepositions were occasionally doubled: – Æ (Eur.Ion 717), a – Æ (Pl.Cri. 100.115). This is not unlike what Modern Greek does when it turns a simplex preposition into a compound one through the addition of a (less polysemous) adverb: Modern Greek

>

ÆÇd

“together with”

Modern Greek alone would otherwise cover a very wide semantic range: Ø lº e Æ æÆ ı ÆØØ lº e Æ æÆ ı ÆØØ lº ºøçæE Œ ººÆ lº e Æº ª ØÇ e æØ lº ŒæÆ ºÅ lº æØçæÅ Å ª ºÆ lº c æçæ ı

‘he lives with his father’ ‘he travels with his father’ ‘(s)he travels by coach’ ‘the girl in a coat’ ‘(s)he filled the glass with wine’ ‘(s)he spoke with contempt’ ‘(s)he laughed at his accent’

Location Company Instrument Description Content Mode Cause

Adverbs are added to prepositions in several languages, and the aim (or the result) appears to be always semantic strengthening or disambiguation: reinforcing the meaning or one out of several meanings.9 In Dutch too there is, in popular speech, a tendency to use prepositions compounded with adverbs, and these forms are indeed referred to as the verzwaarde vorm “reinforced form” (Heestermans 1979: 37 et passim), because they are used de verloren gegane aanschouwelijkheid van het voorzetsel te herstellen, of de betekenis van het voorzetsel te nuanceren ‘to restore the lost clarity of the preposition, or to add a nuance to the meaning of the preposition’. (Heestermans 1979: 149)

In the Ja¨mtland dialect of Swedish, the simplex prepositions of the standard language appear compounded with another preposition indicating motion in the same direction (Reinhammar 1992: 35-6): standard av “of[f]” is ta which is from ut þ av, literally ‘out þ of[f]’:

9 On semantic reinforcement in language, see also Lehmann (1995: 22ff.).

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Ja¨mtlandic

tvo ta dra¨ngom ¼

Swedish tva˚ av dra¨ngarna

‘two of the boys’

Standard Swedish ur “out of ” appears as tu, which is from ut þ ur, literally “out þ out-of ” (like post-Classical Greek ø-Ł): Ja¨mtlandic

ga˚ tu veia ¼ Swedish ga˚ ur va¨gen ‘go out of the way’.

1.5 Prepositions and cases as synsemantic expressions Anyone familiar with a Classical Indo-European language like Latin and Greek, or indeed with Modern German, knows that combinations of prepositions and cases can yield unique combinatory meanings. Therefore, the schema at p.3 should be expanded to recognize that adpositional phrases and caseinflected nouns can also be semantically equivalent to combinations of adposition þ case: (i) [preposition] or [postposition] (ii) [(noun) þ case] (iii) [preposition] þ [(noun) þ case] or [(noun) þ case] þ [postposition] Is the fact that adposition and case are separate not a problem for inclusion in the list above? To answer this question we can start by noting recognized instances of discontinuous morphology elsewhere in the grammar. Let us also note that it is traditionally accepted that in a phrase such as, for example, K KåŁæH åøæH “from hostile lands”, the two genitives are selected only once: the preposition does not govern two genitives. It is assumed that the preposition assigns, through government (rectio), case to the noun, and then, the adjective acquires it via agreement (concors). Applying Matthews’ (1974: 149) argument to Greek, we can say that here -H . . . -H is a single discontinuous (allo)morph of the case.10 We can then agree with Hjelmslev (1932: 17) that ‘La grammaire e´tablit a` tort une diffe´rence essentielle entre la rection et la concordance’. Some modern morphologists (cf. Aronoff and Fudeman 2005: 184 n.6) endorse the view that the whole NP receives case, via government, as a discontinuous feature. Some would take this kind of analysis one step further. They may also describe K . . . H, the combination of preposition and case, as a discontinuous morph. Matthews (1974: 158) initially advised against proceeding on this path, because “the whole basis for the division of 10 The fact that -H is a cumulative exponent (an element carrying two inextricable features) GEN þ PLUR is also of interest but extraneous to the present discussion.


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morphology and syntax would be swept away”, but he later conceded (1991: 206ff.) that the syntax/morphology boundary is questionable. Other linguists, even earlier ones, had accepted the blurring of morphology and syntax as fact: Cate´gorie et rection sont donc en fonction l’une de l’autre. . . . Le syntagmatique et le paradigmatique se conditionnent constamment. Aussi n’a-t-on jamais reússi, malgre´ tous les efforts, a` se´parer comple`tement la morphologie et la syntaxe. Category and government are thus interdependent . . . The syntagmatic and the paradigmatic constantly affect each other. So, despite all efforts, we have never managed to separate morphology and syntax entirely. (Hjelmslev 1932: 15)

Matthews (1974) pointed out that the analysis of preposition and case as a single discontinuous element is usually spurned because it rejects wordboundaries and so denies that there is a closer relation (in my examples) between åøæ- and -H than between K and -H. This is, presumably, deemed undesirable because -H immediately follow åøæ- and is bound to it, whereas it is separated from K. Morphemes are not necessarily discrete elements linearly ordered. The classical notion of morpheme that we inherited from structuralists sees morphemes as indivisible units, in a one-to-one correspondence with actual morphs. But what constitutes a unit conceptually need not appear as such on the surface. The evidence is plentiful (cf. also Aronoff and Fudeman 2005: 3): reduplication, infixation, morphologically-governed ablaut, and suprafixation (variation in tonal pattern to mark inflection). Approaches have been developed that handle these phenomena without transformational formalisms; one of these, for example, is Nonconcatenative Morphology (NCM), propounded by McCarthy (1981: 376ff.).11 Developed for Arabic and Semitic languages, NCM is not entirely unlike the notation of autosegmental phonology, and re-echoes the “staggered” or “long components” of structuralism (cf. Harris 1951: 165, 299ff.). In Classical Greek there are known instances of combinatory case marking, which are accepted as equivalent to case marking by means of inflection alone in other declensions: Nominative: Ææ# lengthened grade vowel þ stem-final accent þ zero ending Genitive: Æ#æ zero grade of the vowel þ accent on ending þ ending Accusative: Æ æÆ /e/ grade of the vowel þ stem-final accent þ Æ ending 11 His definition of a morpheme is ‘an ordered string of 1xn feature matrices associated autosegmentally with a root node . . . . All morphological rules are of the form A > B/X, where A is a single element or zero, and B and X are (possibly null) strings of elements.’

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Icelandic too has declensions that mark case with both umlaut and suffixation: Nominative plural: Genitive plural: Dative plural:

menn-# mann-a mo¨nn-um

‘men’ ‘of men’ ‘to men’

Other types of morphemes are commonly split into two submorphemes. An example is the plural morpheme in many Germanic languages:12 German Dutch Yiddish Swedish Norwegian (Nynorsk)

ein Kraft een schip eyn hoiz en spa˚ng ei bok

> > > > >

zwei Kra¨ft-e force(s) twee schep-en ship(s) tsvey haiz-er house(s) tva˚ spa¨ng-er pole(s) book(s) to bøk-er

In the case of such plural markers, a “discontinuous element” view has long been accepted. That those morphemes can be split into submorphemes appearing at different points along the phonological string is no novelty in Indo-European philology, “Rien de plus banal” according to Kuryłowicz (1949: 132). Discontinuous plural marking is also widely attested outside of Indo-European. It seems to have been used in Etruscan too (Bonfante 1990: 19ff.): (1.27) clan > ‘son’

clen-ar ‘sons’

These splits can occur in many areas of the grammar: Icelandic repeats the pattern in its verbal conjugations: ‘thou goest’ ‘we go’ ‘they go’

þu´ við þeir

fer-ð fo¨r-um far-a

However, in the verbal conjugation of several Germanic and Romance languages, as well as in Modern Greek, one finds polylectic combinations equivalent to monolectic forms. In Modern Greek, there are periphrastic

12 Umlaut, of course, is historically a form of assimilation of the stem-vowel to the ending, but this is synchronically immaterial. The fact that we are dealing with cumulative exponents that also mark number is likewise irrelevant to the present discussion.


23

tenses like åø ªæłØ “I-have written”. The existence of two separate sub-morphemes, å- and ªæłØ, is not just an orthographical convention, for å(ø) also exists independently, and other items can come between them: åø XÅ ªæłØ “I have already written”. Nonetheless, åø ªæłØ (like its counterparts in Romance or Germanic) is rightly regarded as essentially equivalent to the monolectic tenses: Modern Greek German Italian

åø ªæÆłØ ich habe geschrieben ho scritto

¼ ªæÆłÆ ¼ ich schrieb ¼ scrissi

In many varieties of Italian and Germanic (northern Italian, Schwyzertuü¨tsch, Yiddish, Afrikaans) the compound form has replaced the monolectic form altogether. In Germanic, the elements ge- . . . . .-en of geschrieben are themselves a discontinuous morph, a circumfix (cf. Bauer 2003: 28–30), not unlike the infixes and transfixes of the Arabic ‘broken plurals’ ( ) or of the Hebrew verbal ‘building’ templates (NJQ JQ B). The Ancient Greek perfect tenses could also be said to have discontinuous morphs, as they are usually marked by both the initial ‘reduplication’ (IÆØºÆ ØÆ ) and the characteristic -Œ- element, e.g. º -ºı-Œ-Æ. In Greek [preposition þ case] syntagms, the two elements are relatively independent, and other constituents are freely inserted: (1.29) K prepos. ‘in

fiB art. þ case the

[H ¯ ººø] [other constituent] [of the Greeks]

åæÆfi noun þ case land’

We saw earlier (p.9) that the Swedish article can be either an ending or a preposed free form; let us note that if no relative clause follows, and a qualifier is inserted, the Swedish noun has both definiteness markers, which must be seen as two subparts of one: den fo¨ljande bil-en

‘the following car’

Furthermore, if a Swedish definite noun is characterized by an adjective (and no relative clause follows), the adjective in itself, besides being preceded by an article, also contains another (submorph of the) definiteness marker. Thus the definiteness marker (the article) appears before the two items and is suffixed to both of them: den bla˚-a bil-en

‘the blue car’

(cf. en bla˚ bil ‘a blue car’)

24


We could therefore say that the Swedish definiteness marker here consists of three parts, an unbound one followed by two bound ones, which is what some wish to say about the case marker in constructions like K KåŁæH åøæH: K þ H þ H. It has been argued (Julien 2007b: 35–9) that the Swedish multiple definiteness exponents above can convey slightly different aspects of definiteness (specificity and inclusiveness) at different points in their sequence; the ancient Greek, Latin, or German, combinations of preposition þ case may also, in some instances, convey different specifications, such as location þ direction (if any): Classical Greek

Ææþ GENITIVE Ææþ DATIVE Ææþ ACCUSATIVE

¼ ¼ ¼

from near at near to near

ablative sense locative sense allative sense

In Kracht’s (2002: 31) terminology, there is a modalizer and a localizer. We should not assume, however, that in the languages where we find prepositions but no cases, the preposition alone expresses a single spatial relation; as pointed out by some analyses of English (e.g. Bennett 1975: 18) directional expressions also imply a locative expression, even when this is not morphologically evident: to a place ¼ to [at a place] from a place ¼ from [at a place] It may not be evident in constructions such as it went

under [the table]

but in other constructions direction is clearly expressed distinctly from position: it came

from [under [the table]]

So, combinations of prepositions and cases, and combinations of multiple prepositions can perform the same function as prepositions alone. Prepositions in Ancient Greek were initially added to an inflected noun in order to add to the meaning of the case form. This gave rise to combinations in which the original individual senses of the preposition and the case were still clear. Gradually, the syntagm [preposition þ case] developed unpredictable combinatory meanings which the initial components did not have: at that stage only a synsemantic (and, some would say, monomorphemic) description is plausible (cf. also Jimeńez Lo´pez 1994: 226). The meaning of the preposition can then only be determined by taking it together with the case;


25

Kuryłowicz (1949: 134) had a point when he said that if the meaning of two [preposition þ case] combinations is completely different despite the same P, we have “deux pre´positions diffe´rentes”. The capacity that some prepositions have to govern different cases constitutes, therefore, no evidence that the case form is semantically autonomous. Furthermore, in a number of languages, case forms alone incorporate both locative and directional morphs, as combinations of prepositions and cases can. They reflect in their linguistic complexity the cognitive complexity of the spatial relation expressed (Svorou 1994: 34). In Estonian, directional morphemes seem to be added to the one expressing static location: katus-e-l katus-e-l-e katus-e-l-t

ADESSIVE ALLATIVE ABLATIVE

‘at (¼on) the roof’ ‘to (¼onto) the roof’ ‘from (¼off) the roof ’

So in Malayalam (Prabhakara Variar 1976: 99), a Dravidian language spoken in southern India: (1.30) muri- yil room LOCAT ‘in the room’

muri- yil- e:kk# room LOC ALLAT ‘to the room’

muri- yil- u:t:e room LOC PERLAT ‘through the room’

muri -yil -ninn# room LOC ABLAT ‘from the room’ This further confirms the comparability of cases, prepositions, and combinations of prepositions and cases.

1.6 Compound prepositions Many theoreticians recognize that certain sequences constitute “complex prepositions” (cf. Miller 1985: 57ff.); and there are now studies on the compound prepositions of several languages—for example Ilinski (2003: 143–262) for French, Hoffman (2005) for English. But not all linguists agree that compound prepositions exist in the first place.13 In the classification of prepositions made by Brndal (1940: 13)—a widely influential pioneering 13 Opinions vary not only as to whether compound prepositions are prepositions, but also as to which prepositions are to be regarded as compound(ed). It may seem surprising, for instance, that Quirk et al. (1972: 301) do not regard without, aboard, or notwithstanding as compound (unlike except for).

26


study on the category (cf. Jakobson 1936: 243)—not only were such forms not regarded as compounds, but they were refused the status of prepositions altogether. Brndal (ibid. and 1928: 80) specifically states that combinations of two prepositions (like English into, without, or Greek Æ) are not prepositions. Even more linguists would deny prepositional status to constructions consisting of P1–N–P2 sequences, such as with regard to, or in accordance with. A few—notably Sigurd (1993: 197)—have, on the contrary, argued for the “multi-word preposition” status of sequences such as in spite of, because it is intuitively and distributionally equivalent to the preposition despite, and just as invariable. But these sequences usually receive no autonomous status distinct from the individual lexical items that constitute them. They start off, of course, as open syntactic phrases, and many other P1–N–P2 strings do not constitute units. The degree of cohesion or invariability of all these strings can even be measured on a scale (see Quirk et al. 1972: 302; Quirk et al. 1985: 671), according to whether the noun(s) they encapsulate can be inflected for number or replaced by synonyms; whether articles can be added, deleted, or swapped; whether the final preposition can be changed; whether intensifiers can be freely added; and so forth. How can one decide if a sequence of prepositions constitutes a single compound preposition? One diagnostic criterion could be semantics. Consider English as to, the meaning of which cannot be immediately derived from those of as and to. In these instances, the total is more than the sum of the parts, as the components acquire a particular sense only if together ( ı

Å ÆØ). There is, therefore, a case for postulating that as to is, semantically, a compound. Matthews (1981: 87ff.) described up till as a “complex preposition” because up exists on its own but has a different meaning, so in up till the second element is required; he concluded that in terms of constituency analysis, up and till form a single syntagm distinct from their noun phrase, for example [[up till] Friday]. This is consistent with our analysis of [preposition þ case]: such syntagms can likewise be either the sum of the individual meaning of the two original components, or develop a new combinatory meaning. Only in the latter instance can we talk of a single, synsemantic unit. We will make similar considerations for Modern Greek sequences: Modern Greek also has combinations in which the meaning of the compound differs from that of the first element alone, or of the second element alone, or of the first element in combination with other simplex prepositions, so that, for example, Œø I, literally “under” þ “from”, can mean “to under”.


27

Thus the postulation of compound prepositions makes sense on semantic grounds; next, it needs to be defined in syntactic terms.

1.7 The structure of prepositional phrases Which structures are possible for (and can be regarded as) PPs? In the early 1970s, Jackendoff aptly remarked: People seem never to have taken prepositions seriously . . . they deny that the category “preposition” has any real intrinsic syntactic interest other than as an annoying little surface peculiarity. . . . The neglect of prepositions arises from the assumption that prepositional phrases invariably take the form: P–NP: if this were the case, prepositions would indeed be dull. (Jackendoff 1973: 345)

Modern grammars (e.g. of English, cf. Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 598–9) now accept that prepositions include many more elements than traditionally thought. Following Jackendoff ’s analysis of English PPs (ibid.), we can recognize that there are several types of PPs in Modern Greek. This is desirable, in particular, because many important prepositions of English and of Ancient Greek translate into Modern Greek as combinations of prepositions. A fuller picture of the Modern Greek prepositional system is given in Chapter 7, but let us note here that, beside the accepted type A a e E

‘we go after the meal’

there are reasons to postulate other structures. First, an even simpler one: A a

‘we go after(wards)’

The unity between prepositions and many adverbs is suggested by their frequent morphological identity, as we just saw with , and by their syntactic similarity, since they satisfy equally the subcategorization requirements of the same verbs (cf. Jackendoff 1973: 345–6, 1983: 162): Æº a Ø ºÆ [ e æçØ] Æº a Ø ºÆ [Œø]

‘(s)he put the books [on the shelf]’ ‘(s)he put the books [down]

In English there are some 40 such adverb-prepositions (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 612). The synchronic affinity between prepositions and adverbs (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 662) has long been noted. Aristotle (Poet. 1456b) had grouped prepositions and adverbs (as well as other items) under the heading

Ø, whence the Latin con-junctiones; Arab grammarians also lumped prepositions and adverbs together (with conjunctions and interjections)

28


under the label of /huru:f/ (Haywood and Nahmad 1965: 412). Old grammarians simply stated that prepositions “adverbia faciunt si quando illas non subsecuntur casus” (Diomedes, ed. Keil 1857: I: 409). Many modern linguists (cf. Tallerman 2005: 47–8) agree, and call adverbs “intransitive prepositions”; Jespersen (1924: 87–9) had taken the same view, pointing out that verbs are not traditionally split into totally separate categories according to whether they take objects or not, which is the same difference that we find between prepositions and their corresponding adverbs: æø -----------æø e çÆªÅ ı

(intrans. verb) (transit. verb)

‘I am eating’ ‘I am eating my food’

A --------A a e E

(‘adverb’) (‘preposition’)

‘we go afterwards’ ‘we go after the dinner’

As noted by Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 612–15), although there are adverbs that we would not want to classify as prepositions, of those we would, most are spatial, some temporal, and only very few have other meanings; some adverbs, they say, should be recognized as ‘marginal members’ of the category ‘prepositions’ (ibid.: 615). Jackendoff (1973) recognized prepositions, particles, and adverbs as prepositions, Miller (1985: 59,92) reached analogous conclusions, and so do many in the generative tradition (Radford 1988: 134, Tallerman 2005: 47). The differences of environment could be handled in the lexicon with subcategorization frames.14

14 The question of the classification of other items, such as non-spatial adverbs, conjunctions, and “particles” (however defined) is beyond the scope of this study. Some English grammars accept conjunctions as prepositions (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 600). Let us just note that subordinating conjunctions, which Jespersen (1924: 89) had called “sentence prepositions”, can be seen as “simply prepositions used with a clausal complement” (Radford 1988: 137), and are indeed often morphologically identical to prepositions (before [the film]/before [we watch the film]). “Particles” are more problematic because there is no consensus on the meaning of the term: the Dictionary of Language (Crystal 2001: 252) candidly defines a particle as “An invariable item with a grammatical function. The term is especially used for a form which does not readily fit into a standard classification of parts of speech”. If we simply accept the definition of “particle” given by Jackendoff (1977: 79), “the [- complement] counterpart of a P”, corresponding to items which Quirk et al. (1985: 713–16) termed “prepositional adverbs”, we have to agree that they do exhibit strong similarities with prepositions and adverbs: frequent phonological identity and acceptance of the same modifiers (e.g. she went [straight] up [the ladder]), as well as fulfilment of co-occurrence restrictions with the same verb (he put the cake in/inside/in the oven). Emonds (1985: 253–63) argued that such particles are prepositions, and Svenonius (2004: 18) also observes that they “share with adpositions all the characteristics which do not specifically refer to complements”.


29

The same verbal subcategorization requirements can also be seen to be satisfied by some sequences of adverb þ preposition, which suggests that those sequences may form a single constituent: (1.31)

a Æº a Ø ºÆ [KŒE] ‘(s)he put the books [there]’ b Æº a Ø ºÆ [ø] ‘(s)he put the books [on top/up(stairs)]’ c Æº a Ø ºÆ [ c ŒÆæ ŒºÆ] ‘(s)he put the books [‘at’ the chair]’ d Æº a Ø ºÆ [ø c ŒÆæ ŒºÆ] ‘(s)he put the books [‘on at’ the chair]’

The combination of a primarily intransitive and an obligatorily transitive preposition (ø ) is therefore a compound preposition, another possible expansion of a PP. Jackendoff (1973: 348) described this as “quite common (though frequently overlooked)”. Thus, in Greek: A a Ie e E

‘we go after [lit. after from] the dinner’

Alternations like the Greek synonymous [ [NP]] and [ a Ie [NP]] have parallels in other European languages; cf. English adjacent þ NP / adjacent to þ NP, Italian sopra þ NP / sopra a þ NP. So, although on the surface we see linear sequences of prepositions, they are not always independent prepositions in succession. The postulation of this is particularly important for Modern Greek. If sequences of this kind were to be ruled out from the category of ‘prepositions’, the Modern Greek prepositional inventory would be very meagre; and since sequences of this kind have replaced numerous simplex prepositions of the Classical language, the history of Greek prepositions would just be one of loss. To accept some sequences of prepositions as a single compound preposition is, however, in utter contravention of the traditional definitions of prepositions, such as those laid down by Brndal (1940: 1). His definition required prepositions to be short, general, and few. Whether he realized it or not, his three postulates are interrelated: (i) To be short means monolectic. Thus, in Modern Greek and I meet the requirements but Œa and a I do not; (ii) For a preposition to be short, it also has to be monomorphemic, in effect banning from the inventory all items that make multiple

30

Background to Greek prepositions semantic specifications—typically, those also marking dimensionality. Again, Modern Greek I “from” passes muster, but ø I “above”, contrasting with ø “on”, does not. Thus the accepted prepositions, by being short, are indeed (as Brndal demanded) also only general; (iii) The exclusion of polymorphemic or polylectic prepositions naturally narrows down the number of expressions classifiable as prepositions: hence they are indeed few. As Hage`ge (1975: 74) noted, Brndal really “limite de manie`re draconienne le nombre” of prepositions. In Modern Greek, monolectic prepositions like I are very few: “adverbs” like Œ “near”, ø “behind”, unlike their English synonyms, cannot function as prepositions and need to be compounded in order to be transitive:15

(a) [from] the house ! (Æ) [Ie] e Ø (b) [behind] the house ! ( ) *[ ø] e Ø ! [ ø Ie] e Ø Brndal (1940: 12–13) affirmed categorically that Det flger umiddelbart af Definitionen af Begrebet Præposition som Sprogets simpleste Udtryk for Relation, at kun Ord af helt enkel Struktur br anerkendes som Præpositioner. Som uægte eller uegentlige maa alltsaa udskilles alle Dannelser af sammensakt Karakter: dels syntaktiske (som Talemaader og Sammensætninger), dels morphologiske (som Afledninger og Ord af mere complex Karakter). It follows directly from the definition of the concept of preposition as the simplest expression of relation in language, that only words of completely simple structure should be recognized as prepositions. As untrue or improper, therefore, must also be distinguished all formations of compound character: both syntactically (such as turns of phrase or compounds) and morphologically (such as derivatives and words of more complex character).

But we should agree with Jackendoff (although he was only referring to English) rather than with Brndal, because this enables us to distinguish compound prepositions from accidental sequences of independent prepositions belonging to separate PPs. His approach enables us, for instance, to distinguish the function of

Æ in the following sentences: (1.32)

a ªÆ r ÆØ [

Æ º Øa ıºÆ] the cat is inside in a cupboard ‘the cat is inside a cupboard’

15 Except with enclitic weak forms of pronouns with animate referent: Œ ı, ø ı. See p.258.


31

to be contrasted with: b ªÆ rÆØ [

Æ] [ b Øa ıºÆ] the cat is inside in a cupboard ‘the cat is indoors in a cupboard’ In other words, in Modern Greek the same strings of prepositions sometimes do and sometimes do not constitute compound prepositions (i.e. they are intransitive prepositions followed by a standard prepositional phrase). The fact that there is a closer link between

Æ and ( ) in the first sentence above than in the second is corroborated by the fact that in the first it is less tolerant of interjections; if the sequence is interrupted, the non-compound reading is more likely: (1.33) ªÆ rÆØ

Æ, Çø, c ıºÆ ‘the cat is inside, I think, in the cupboard’ ¼ ‘the cat is indoors, I think, in the cupboard’ If we contrast combinations that seem to produce compound prepositions with other sequences that do not, the standard tests for constituency appear to corroborate the distinction: ø I “outside” is different from ø

“out, in”: (1.34) a ø Ie c ºÅ ‘outside the city’ b ø (b) c ºÅ ‘out, in the city’ Observe again how the latter phrase is breakable (the “sentence fragment test”): (1.35) a rÆØ ø; Æ, c ºÅ rÆØ ‘is (s)he out? / yes, (s)he is in town’ b rÆØ ø; *Æ, Ie c ºÅ rÆØ ‘is (s)he out? / yes, (s)he is from town’ (not the meaning required) To a limited extent, English has similar surface ambiguities: she is out—of the city she is out][in the city

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There are of course, numerous other distinctions that can be made between various sequences of prepositional phrases—the main being between complements and adjuncts: (1.36) a › ˆØÅ ÇØ Æ Ø º e ŒÆÆ

‘John puts a book on the sofa’ (PP is a complement) b › ˆØÅ ØÆ ÇØ Æ Ø º e ŒÆÆ

‘John reads a book on the sofa’ (PP is an adjunct) but this is not relevant to our concerns of how each Greek preposition evolved diachronically, and will not be pursued in any detail. Given the central role that they play, on the other hand, we will treat the modern “compound prepositions” (e.g. ø I, ø ) and the classical “improper” prepositions (e.g. åæØ, – Æ) as equally central to this study as the “few, short and general” basic, monolectic, transitive, case-governing prepositions.

2 On the meaning of prepositions Prepositions can be taken as exemplary in the study of the semantic representation and processing of lexical units in general (Zelinski-Wibbelt 1993: 10)

2.1 The meaning(lessness) of cases Before looking at the semantics of prepositions, let us look at the semantics of case forms. In the course of time, linguists have disagreed in their conception of the semantics of case, postulating different numbers of meanings for each case, varying degrees of relatedness between them, or lack of any relation between them, or indeed the lack of any meaning altogether. The only point on which old and modern scholars concur is that the issue is of exceptional difficulty and has not been settled: Casus igitur per veterum definitionem quid sit non satis cognosci potest. (Scaliger 1540: 146) cases form one of the most irrational parts of language in general. (Jespersen 1924: 186) Case-categories . . . resemble various situations in the practical world but never with any consistency. (Bloomfield 1933: 272) there is general consensus that the category of case is more resistant to analysis than other grammaticalized semantic domains. (Brecht and Levine 1986: 18)

Cases appear to be unpredictable, and were therefore assumed to be per se semantically empty. And many examples can be found that seem to suggest they are. For example, regardless of what case they take in the singular, all Latvian prepositions take the dative in the plural, without change in meaning. The prepositions uz “on”, for instance, requires the nouns it governs to be in the genitive if singular, but in the dative if plural, the choice of case obviously not being dictated by the semantics of the preposition:

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‘on the chair’ ‘on the chairs’

> >

uz kre¯sla (genitive sing.) uz kre¯sliem (dative plur.)

The only way to cut the knot is to postulate a separate case that happens to coincide morphologically with the genitive in the singular and with the dative in the plural (cf. Budina Lazdina 1966: 39; Endzelıˆns 1951: 395). ˙ ˙ The early versions of Chomsky’s Generative Grammar were based on a rule system essentially independent of meaning (Lee 2001: 1); the generative interpretation of morphological case saw case as a phenomenon dictated by structure or by lexical specifications (subcategorizations) so that “case forms are basically meaningless” (Brecht and Levine 1986: 21, see history and discussion in Butt 2006: 46–88). This indeed gave the impression that “generative grammar has on the whole had little to say about meaning” (Jackendoff 2002: 268).1 Other linguists have argued, on the contrary, that case forms (and prepositions) do have intrinsic meaning. Wierzbicka (1980: xvii–xix), asked “why should languages be so perverse and wasteful” as to impose on users countless meaningless categories. She defended the semantic import of cases, and chastised not only Government and Binding (GB) theory, but also other approaches from the 1960s onwards, such as Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), for assuming case forms to be meaningless and for dismissing them as surface phenomena. Fillmore, however, did give increasing thought to case meaning, as testified by his later papers (Fillmore 1977b, 1977c, 1977d). By the 1980s, Generative Grammar too moved away from the dogma that semantics should be excluded from syntax, and introduced semantic relations (y-roles) in Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981: 35) increasing their import in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995: ch. 3 }3.2). It is easy to find counterexamples to the Latvian examples above—instances of case usage in which the case form appears to carry a significant semantic load. For instance, in Russian (Brecht and Levine 1986: 25): (2.1)

a jy [jlb d gfhr ‘he walked to the park [B þ accusative]’ b jy [jlb d gfhrt ‘he walked in the park [B þ locative]’

1

In some instances case choice may also seem to be independent of the syntactic function of the noun. The same case may mark opposite or incompatible functions, such as the subject and the object in synonymous active and passive sentences: Latin

mihi persuadet mihi persuadetur ab illo

‘he persuades me[DATIVE]’ ‘I[DATIVE] am persuaded by him’.

On the meaning of prepositions

35

In Classical Greek too, there are similar instances: (2.2) a qºŁ Ææa Æ Øº Æ ‘(s)he went to the king[ACCUSATIVE]’ b qºŁ Ææa Æ Øº ø ‘(s)he came from the king[GEN( > > > >

va dal dentista viene da Parigi passo da Nizza dall’ antichita´ vestito da donna

‘she goes to the dentist’ ‘he comes from Paris’ ‘go through/via Nice’ ‘since antiquity’ ‘dressed as a woman’

> capire dal suo sguardo ‘understand from his glance’

> comportarsi da traditore assez beˆte pour le dire > cosı´ scemo da dirlo elle va au coiffeur > va dal parrucchiere

‘behave like a traitor’ ‘so stupid as to say it’ ‘she goes to the hairdresser’

A preposition (or a case) may have different, even incompatible meanings synchronically, or may develop them diachronically. How are we to classify the various meanings of a preposition? Are they truly separate meanings, or variations on a basic single one? This is, in essence, the distinction that lexicographers make between homonymy and polysemy. Most linguists appear to endorse a conception of prepositional meaning as a combination of an inherent meaning with a specification supplied by the context; in the terminology diffused by Jakobson (1936: 240ff.): different Sonderbedeutungen in each particular context, but related through an overall Gesamtbedeutung in abstract, or an underlying Grundbedeutung at the origin. Others do not seem to think that the different meanings of a preposition share a connection: Colombo and Flores D’Arcais (1984: 54, 81) carried out experiments to identify the synchronically primary or most salient meaning of Dutch prepositions. It turned out, almost invariably, to be spatial (cf. also Brown and Miller 1982: 184). For example, the hierarchy of the meanings of voor was basically as shown in Figure 2.1. They noted that some meanings are perceived by speakers as immediately connected, sharing a relational content, while others are not. However, whether all meanings could be related at a deeper level, or diachronically, was not taken into account. In their view, for example, the comitative and the instrumental meanings of Dutch met (“together with” and “using”), or the perlative and the agentive meanings of door (“through” and “by”) are “completely different. It is not


43

BEFORE IN SPACE BEFORE IN TIME

VOOR

FOR = EQUIVALENT TO FOR = AIMING AT FOR = IN FAVOUR OF

FIGURE 2.1 Source: Adapted from Colombo and Flores D’Arcais 1984: 85.

easy to find a relation common to the two uses” (Colombo and Flores D’Arcais 1984: 54). In what way could they have been linked? Although the local meaning of the prepositions examined turned out to be the main one, the investigators did not see it as the origin of the other senses. Crisari (1971: 100) had concluded that at the semantic core of a preposition there is indeed a single meaning, but posited that it would be “assolutamente astratto”; Jackendoff (1978: 218) had a more proficuous suggestion: the different meanings of a preposition are arrived at by reapplying the semantic structure of its basic meaning to new semantic fields, making a “cross-field generalization” of its relational meaning on the basis of the context. Wege (1991: 278ff.) went further, presuming an inherent specifically local sense, mixed with relational features that depend on the context. The fact that cases and prepositions become less predictable and often less “meaningful” when their sense is not spatial (cf. p. 40) fits well with the conjecture that the basic meaning is spatial and that other meanings are metaphors.

2.4 Contiguity of meanings Polysemy, the synchronic co-occurrence or diachronic development of multiple meanings in the same preposition or case form, is therefore perhaps not accidental. Some independent trends can be discerned, whereby pairs or groups of meanings tend to be expressed formally by the same morpheme, word, or construction. This is often due to some affinity between those meanings, and rarely by chance. The overlap found in many languages, such as Russian or Sanskrit, between instrumental and agentive case markers is arguably due to a semantic contiguity (Lyons 1968: 298) rather than morphological or phonological accident. Less often noticed is the relationship between locative and comitative cases and adpositions. Although the comitative is not usually cited as a local case, its logical spatial basis has long been clear to philosophy: Leibniz (1765: 3,}1) noted that “un corps est

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avec un autre lorsqu’ils sont dans un meˆme lieu”, and we do not need to look too far for philological evidence: the Modern English comitative preposition with in Old English was a locative, essentially adessive (ad-esse “be close”) preposition, indicating proximity, while comitative and instrumental meanings were expressed by the preposition mid. The cognate of English with in Old Norse had the same adessive sense, and that local sense is fully preserved to this day in Scandinavian languages: Icelandic Swedish Danish

hann stoð við eldinn de satt vid bordet lærer ved universitet

‘he stood by the fire’ ‘they sat at the table’ ‘lecturer at university’

In Sumerian too, the comitative marker -da/-da5 (-de`) comes from a locational noun meaning “side” (Thomsen 1984: 99). The semantic closeness of comitative and locative is also evident in Ancient Greek: there, by a reverse process, the old instrumental-comitative had been ousted by the locative (Kuryłowicz 1964: 196). By the same token, Umbrian (Rix 2002: 169–70) used as a locative the postposition -co(m), cognate of the Latin comitative preposition cum “with” (also attested in Latin as a postpositional suffix in forms like vobis-cum “with you”): Umbrian

termnu-co ueris-co uocu-com

‘at the boundary’ ‘at the gate’ ‘at the grave’

The Hebrew comitative preposition DO S /imma:d/ is related to Arabic /inda/ “beside”; the comitative Catalan preposition amb may also fit this pattern, as it probably derives from the locational Latin preposition apud “at, near”. In Modern English the meaning of the (once adessive now comitative) preposition with has been extended to abstract notions such as cause (Clark and Carpenter 1989: 4): be at home with the flu, tremble with fear, in a semantic chain believed to have started from the local sense (cf. Brown and Miller 1982: 184). Similarly, in the Fijian preposition e (see data in Geraghty 1976: 508ff.) the locative sense appears to have spawned a comitative meaning, from which an instrumental sense was derived:7 locative
> Adessive: > >

naïn sen omin silmin paljain païn kirja on poÿda¨lla¨ syo¨n lusikalla

‘I saw it with my eyes’ (instrument) ‘with uncovered head’ (manner) ‘the book is on the table’ (location) ‘I eat with a spoon’ (instrument)

The Finnish adessive (i.e. locative) case has therefore instrumental meaning. We saw earlier (p. 43–5) that the expression of locative meaning in many languages has become comitative, and that the expression of comitative meaning has often become instrumental. The shift from comitative to instrumental, furthermore, has been found to be unidirectional (Heine and Kuteva 2005: 200). We can then note, in post-Classical Greek as in languages across the world, frequent instances of coincidence of (the case or) adposition employed for the marking of motionless position (locative) and approaching movement (allative): (2.7)

Modern Greek: a stative location æ ŒÆØ c ºÅ ‘(s)he is in town’

b goal motion Ø c ºÅ ‘(s)he goes to town’

Thus the same preposition marks both result locations (with verbs of inherently directed motion) or simple locations (with verbs that do not denote directed movement, including static verbs). Examples are rife: the distinction locative/allative in many languages appears to be synchronically lacking or diachronically lost: both English both English both English

at and to in and into on and onto

correspond to French a` correspond to Italian in correspond to German auf

French a` comes from the Latin ad “to”, while the descendant of Latin in “in/ at”, French en, is becoming obsolete. In Lithuanian, on the contrary, in (>i˛) has lost any locative sense and only has allative/illative meaning: “(in)to”. An instance of directionalþlocative merger (“directive”þ“dative-locative”) also occurred in Hittite (cf. Luraghi 1991: 64ff.); Japanese too expresses both meanings with the postposition ni. Some theoreticians (e.g. Fillmore 1968: 25) thought that there is only a surface difference between locative and directional, determined by constituent structure or by the verb. We can take these observations a step further by noticing that very many languages mark the recipients of “verbs of giving” in the same way as allatives (and that the allative sense, historically, usually came first): (2.8)

Ancient Greek: a goal motion ø fi

‘fell to the ground’

(Il. 5.82)

On the meaning of prepositions b indirect object ø Ø ÆPfiH . . . Ø Ł ‘he gives to him . . . fee’

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(Xen. An. 1.1.10)

The same double use is found in the Modern Greek preposition , in the Swedish till, in the Turkish dative, or in the Finnish allative case. Finally, we can note that the allative marking used with verbs of giving, in a number of languages, has also been extended to direct objects: (2.9)

Spanish: a goal motion Voy a Madrid ‘I go to Madrid’

b indirect object Le di un regalo a Juan ‘I give a present to John’

c other object He visto a Juan ‘I saw John’ Thus, as Blansitt (1988: 177–8) points out, we find a continuum along which function markers extend their meaning: static location—motion-to—indirect object—direct object Any two (or more) of the functions above can be expressed by the same preposition in transitive clauses only if they are contiguous in the order schema. What is commonly called “indirect object” or “dative” is usually only an allative linked with an experiencer; the distinction between direct and indirect objects have been shown to be undefinable if not unfeasible (cf. Jespersen 1924: 174, S.R. Anderson 1988). All these phenomena suggests that various non-spatial senses of cases or adpositions can be interconnected, perhaps in a chain of semantic developments, and that they are related to a spatial meaning.

2.5 The role of spatial meanings The possible connection between the different meanings of a preposition raises the question of whether one (type of) meaning is synchronically more basic or salient than the others, and of whether one (type of) meaning is diachronically the starting point of the others. For a long time the guess has been occasionally ventured by scholars that spatial expressions in language, regardless of cultural differences, may be, semantically and grammatically, somehow more fundamental than non-spatial ones, and may, in fact, be the basis from which the latter are derived. This conjecture, which has come to be called the “localistic hypothesis”, in its most radical form suggests that locative

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expressions are the foundation of all semantics. As such, a localistic conception may have implications that go far beyond linguistics: In its strongest versions the locative hypothesis constitutes a profound conjecture about the fundamental nature of human language and, by extension, human cognition. (Gee and Kegl 1982: 335)

The concerns of theoretical linguists now largely overlap with those of philosophers, to the point that keeping the two disciplines and, above all, their insights separate “would be folly” (Chomsky 2006: 143). The term “localism” can, however, be understood in different ways; it can, for instance, refer to: (i) psychological processing (ii) language acquisition (iii) language history Nevertheless, the basic localistic idea is usually formulated in very general terms (cf. Lyons 1977: 718; Miller 2001: 19–21). The focus of localistic speculations, both in classical philology and modern linguistics, has primarily been the semantics of cases, for which theories have been developed within different frameworks (cf. Miller 1984: 246, 1985: 121). In the nineteenth century, the idea was well known to (and extensively discussed by) even those who did not share it: Die localistische Casustheorie schreibt allen Casibus obliquis eine raümliche Grundbedeutung zu; die Casus sollen urspru¨nglich nur locale Beziehungen bezeichnet haben; erst spa¨ter seien sie durch Uebertragung localer Beziehungen auf geistige zur Bezeichnung (temporaler und) logischer Beziehungen verwendet worden. The localistic theory of case ascribes a spatial basic meaning to all oblique cases. The cases are supposed to have indicated originally just local relations, and only later to have come to be used for the expression of (temporal and) abstract relations, through the extension of local relations to figuratives ones. (Holzweissig 1877: 6)

Localistic theories of cases are only tangentially relevant to our concern, which is the diachrony of Greek prepositions; it is nonetheless curious to note that their start has been traced back (Robins 1974: 107) to a Byzantine scholar of the thirteenth century, Maximus Planudes, who drew his observations from Greek. To say that Planudes had an general localistic conception, or even a theory, is perhaps an unwarranted exaggeration; but it is true that he is the first scholar on record to relate the Greek cases to basic local meanings:


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Å Øø ‹ø ŒÆ ØÆ çı ØŒc IŒºıŁÆ Æƒ æE ÆyÆØ Kæø Ø, e Ł ŒÆd F ŒÆd fiB, a æE ºÆªÆ KŒºÅæ Æ Ø· e b Ł c ªØŒ, e b F c ØŒ, e b fiB c ÆNØÆØŒ. It is remarkable how by some natural agreement these three questions, “whence”, “where”, and “whither” receive the three oblique cases: “whence” the genitive, “where” the dative, and “whither” the accusative. (Bachman 1828: 122)

As Hjelmslev (1935: 12) remarked, “c’est la meilleure theórie des cas grecs qui ait e´te´ faite”. The Ancient Greek cases could be renamed in a way that reflects more explicitly their spatial sense: genitive > dative > accusative >

ablative locative allative

case of motion-from case of rest-at case of motion-to

The idea that the earliest meaning of the Ancient Greek (and more broadly, Indo-European) cases was spatial was expressed, although rarely as little more than a hunch, by many classical philologists of the nineteenth century: Die Casus-Endungen dru¨cken die wechselseitigen vorzu¨glich und urspru¨nglich einzig raümlichen von Raume auch auf Zeit und Ursache u¨bertragenen Verthaltnisse der Nomina. The case endings express the reciprocal relationships between nouns, which were principally and originally solely spatial, and were extended from space also to time and cause. (Bopp 1833: 136)

The extent to which philologists agreed with this view was very variable, so that “localists” were (and are) not a well-defined category (cf. Michelsen 1843: 14). In the nineteenth century, nonetheless, the extent to which a localistic interpretation was applicable to the case inventory of the classical languages was a hot topic in philological treatises (see Hjelmslev 1935: 36–61). The hypothesis that local senses may be synchronically or diachronically primary has also been voiced (or denied) with reference to prepositions. Brndal was amongst the many scholars totally against a localistic interpretation of prepositions. His views are quite representative: Præpositioner er da ikke i nogen Henseende, selv ikke i abstracteste Forstand, lokale eller rumlige. De har i sig selv intet med Sted, og altsaa intet med Bevægelse eller Hvile, at go¨re . . . hvad Præpositionen ellers maatte betegne, er ikke bundet til Rum eller Tid (det er tværtimod ved Anvendelse af disse abstracte Relationer, at Begreberne Rum og Tid eller “Rum-Tid” bygges op) . . . det er kun Relationerne, ikke Positionerne der udtrykkes ved Præpositioner. Prepositions are in no respect—not even in the most abstract sense—local or spatial. In themselves, they have nothing to do with place, nor with motion or

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rest . . . whatever a preposition may otherwise indicate, it has no connection with space or time (it is on the contrary by using these abstract relations that the concept of space and time or “spatio-temporality” are developed). . . . it is only relations, not positions, that are expressed by prepositions. (Brndal 1928: 80)

Others dismissed the localistic idea outright (cf. Danielsen 1979: 478–9). But nowadays even syntax textbooks (Tallerman 2005: 48) concede that “perhaps the most typical role of prepositions and postpositions is to mark locative and temporal information”. Across the centuries, a number of thinkers and scholars explicitly suggested that the primary meaning of prepositions is spatial, for example: Omne corpus aut mouetur, aut quiescit. . . . Hinc eliciemus Præpositionis essentialem definitionem. . . . Natura omnis constat aut motu, aut quiete. Præpositio autem, harum rerum nota est. Every entity either moves or is still. . . . From this we draw the fundamental definition of prepositions. . . . The nature of everything consists either of motion or rest. And prepositions are the expression of these things. (Scaliger 1540: 301–2) Die Bezeichnung der Raumverha¨ltnisse. . . . macht die Grundbedeutung aller eigentlichen Pra¨positionen aus. . . . Der Gebrauch einer Pra¨position bei erga¨nzenden Beziehungen hat sehr oft seinen Grund darin, dab der zu erga¨nzende Begriff einer nicht sinnlichen Tha¨tigheit durch eine raümliche Bewegung als ihr Gegenbild versinnlicht wird. The indication of spatial relations . . . constitutes the fundamental meaning of all true prepositions. . . . The use of a preposition in supplementary relations is very often due to the fact that the supplementary concept of a non-sensory action is made sensory through a spatial movement as its representation. (Becker 1841: 212)

An explicitly localistic interpretation of prepositions can also be found scattered in the history of broader philosophical discourse: Il sera bon cedependant de conside´rer cette analogie des choses sensibiles et insensibiles, qui a servi de fondement aux tropes: c’est ce qu’on entendra mieux en conside´rant un exemple fort e´tendu tel qu’est celui que fournit l’usage des pre´positions comme a`, avec, de, devant, en, hors, par, pour, sur, vers, qui sont toutes prises du lieu, de la distance, et du mouvement, et transfe´reés depuis a` toute sorte de changemens, ordres, suites, diffe´rences . . . We should examine this analogy between concrete and abstract things, which has served as a basis for turns of phrase. It will be better understood by examining very common examples such as those afforded by the use of prepositions such as to, with, of, in front of, in, outside, through, for, on, towards, which are all taken from space, distance and movement, and then transferred to all sorts of changes, orders, sequences, differences . . . (Leibniz 1765: 3,}1)


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A close inspection of the history of scholarship reveals that in the analyses of adpositional or case systems of various languages, a number of major scholars expressed a localistic perception, although not explicity formulated. Most practical grammars and books describing individual languages also seem to be largely based on tacit localistic assumptions, especially when they deal with cases or prepositions. While a chronology or a critique of localistic (case) theories is beyond our concerns here, awareness of at least some of the main names in the history of this approach is in order. Bopp’s student Wu¨llner (1827: 8), stressing the subjective element of language, its derivation from perception, and analysing the meanings of the Greek genitive, dative, and accusative in localistic terms (ibid.: 13–120), extended his localistic assumption to prepositions: Alle wahre Pra¨positionen haben das gemein, daß sie urspru¨nglich Raumanschauungen bezeichnen. All proper prepositions have the common element that they originally denote notions of space. (Wu¨llner 1827: 7)

The linguist who discussed localism most openly, extensively, and sympathetically in the first part of the twentieth century was Hjelmslev (1935). His main, although not his only, focus was cases; he analysed all cases in terms of variables, the most important ones of which can be summarized as follows: (i) directionality, or lack thereof, thus distinguishing, for instance, the Finnish illative from the elative; (ii) coherence, the “degre´ d’intimite´” distinguishing the Finnish “exterior cases” and “interior cases” (ulkopaikallissijat/sisa¨paikallissijat). (iii) objectivity or subjectivity, i.e. whether the choice of a given case does or does not vary according to the viewpoint of the speaker (e.g. “behind/ in front of the table” is subjective unlike “under/above the table”) Hjelmslev’s most daring suggestion was that all cases—even the cases not commonly regarded as local (or as having a semantic, rather than grammatical, content), such as nominative or accusative—could be analysed in essentially the same terms, treating grammatical relations as derivative in respect to semantic relations.8 Also relevant to our present interest was Hjelmslev’s idea, shared by several others, that case functions (as opposed to forms) are also expressed by prepositions, postpositions, word order, or verbal endings (Janse 1990: 79). 8 On the problems posed by that traditional distinction between local and grammatical cases in ancient Greek, see Bortone (2002).

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After Hjelmslev, a few more linguists have propounded a synchronic localistic interpretation of all semantic relations; amongst them, J. M. Anderson elaborated a localistic theory of case in full, combined with a generative approach. His main work appeared in the late 1970s (Anderson 1977) and he revised it at different stages (cf. Anderson 1997: 169ff. and Anderson 2006: 115–48, 178–219). His starting point is not unlike Planudes’, and his scope encompasses Hjelmslev’s: A localist theory holds that the members of the category of case are opposed to each other in terms of (combinations of) the directional notion “source”, “goal”, and “resting point”. So that not only are the “concrete” uses of case markers to be so interpreted, but also the “abstract”; and indeed even those markers (like the nominative in many languages) which are entirely or almost entirely “abstract” or “grammatical”. (Anderson 1977: 111)

In the belief that non-local relations are synchronically just a product of the nouns and verbs involved, Anderson started by suggesting that there are only four case relations (attributing them to adpositions as much as to cases), resulting from the combination of two binary features: Absolute Locative

Ergative Ablative

——

place

——

place

——

——

source

source

Anderson’s theory of cases aroused much interest, and he is to be credited with having made the localistic hypothesis the object of discussion amongst linguists, philologists, and scholars of other fields, with a variety of responses. Some acknowledged its force—Fillmore (1977c: 90) described Anderson’s theory as “the one that hit hardest” the approach that he had advocated. While the suggestion that all cases could be analysed synchronically on a local basis baffled many traditionalists, the suggestion that the meaning of cases and adpositions might be historically spatial, and that local senses may be diachronically primary, was always met with less resistance: The so-called “localist” theory of cases may be justified from the diachronic point of view. From the synchronic one the expression of spatial relation generally represents one only of the possible functions of a given case-form. (Kuryłowicz 1964: 202)

Some more recent theoreticians appear to take a similar view (cf. Vandeloise 2006: 153). We shall focus on the diachronic validity of the suggestion that local meanings are the starting point of non-local ones, when tracing the diachrony of Greek prepositions. But it is interesting to note that the synchronic validity


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of the localistic hypothesis, albeit not at the core of this study, is also supported by many sources: for example, as we shall see next, psychological studies have provided interesting data on language acquisition, emphasizing the centrality of spatial organization in human cognition, thus shedding light on the age-old enigma of polysemy.

2.6 Language acquisition and development Space has long been recognized as central in the speech of little children (cf. Bowerman 1996: 385). Grimm (1975: 100) after studying children’s acquisition and use of (German) prepositions, reported that the first prepositions used expressed “simple topological relation”. Clark (1973: 28) argued that children acquire linguistic expressions for space and time because they have some prior knowledge of space and time. The child’s acquisition of spatial (and temporal) terminology rests on preliminary sensory knowledge; this knowledge, in other words, derives from the intrinsic nature of a child as a being that lives on this planet, has a certain perceptual apparatus, and moves about in a certain manner. In this sense, Clark argued, one can say that there is a body of knowledge that is somehow innate. As Jackendoff (1983: 210) observed, in human evolution, spatial organization must have existed long before language; pre-linguistic conceptual representation (cf. Mandler 1996: 365ff.) is spatial. The idea that mental concepts must be originally derived from sensory sources (from the visual or tactile perception of the space around us and of what it contains, and from the fact that we are ourselves a body), has been accepted by a number of developmental psychologists (starting from Piaget 1948: 57ff.), but is much older, and can be found, mutatis mutandis, in the work of many philosophers. Kant, in the “Trascendental Aesthetics” in his Critique of Pure Reason (1787: I: }} 1,2,4), wrote: (}1) . . . Alles Denken aber muß sich, es sei geradezu (directe) oder im Umschweife (indirecte), vermittelst gewisser Merkmale zuletzt auf Anschauungen, mithin bei uns auf Sinnlichkeit beziehen, weil uns auf andere Weise kein Gegenstand gegeben werden kann. Die Wirkung eines Gegenstandes auf die Vorstellungsfa¨higkeit, sofern wir von demselben affiziert werden, ist Empfindung. (}2) . . . Vermittelst des aüßeren Sinnes, (einer Eigenschaft unsers Gemu¨ts), stellen wir uns Gegensta¨nde als außer uns und diese insgesamt im Raume vor. . . . Der Raum . . . allen aüßeren Anschauungen zum Grunde liegt. ¨ ußeres . . . Es gibt aber auch außer dem Raum keine andere subjektive und auf etwas A ¨ bezogene Vorstellung, die a priori objektiv heißen konnte. Denn man kann von der Anschauung im Raume herleiten. (}2)

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. . . Wir ko¨nnen demnach nur aus dem Standpunkte eines Menschen von Raum, von ausgedehnten Wesen usw. reden. (}2) (}1) . . . all thought must, through certain signs, relate ultimately to perceptions—in a straight (direct), or roundabout (indirect) way; consequently, in us, it must relate to sense, because an object cannot be given to us in any other way. The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, inasmuch as we are affected by the object, is sensation. (}2) . . . By means of the external sense (a property of our mind) we represent to ourselves objects as outside us, and these as a whole in space. . . . Space . . . is the basis of all external perceptions. (}4) . . . There is not, outside space, any representation subjective and referring to something external (to us), which could be called objective a priori. We derive those from perception in space. . . . We can therefore speak of space, extended objects, etc. only from the human viewpoint. (Kant 1787: I: }}1,2,4)

There is a growing body of evidence supporting an interpretation of human language (and human cognition in general) as based on the human experience of the world, and as developed through the use of metaphors—the starting point being concrete sensorial perceptions. This has wide philosophical implications, although the idea is far from new.9 The Ancient Greeks often noted that ¼Łæø . . . ø rÆØ æ “man is the measure of everything” (Arist. Metaph. 1053a36; cf. also Plato Tht. 152a, 183c). As emphasized by Danesi (1987: 157–64), Nietzsche too saw language in particular as anthropomorphic, and saw cognition as making use of metaphorized images; Vico preceded him in emphasizing the all-pervasive nature of metaphor, and the way in which humans interpret reality through sensorial analogies. Our concrete experience of the world supplies us with schemata such as container–contained, part– whole, centre–periphery, and source–path–goal. There is, therefore, a strong argument for positing theoretical semantic structures that reflect all this (cf. Miller 1984: 244).10 We now have plentiful evidence that natural languages capture the location of an object and its spatial attributes by making reference to the properties of the human body. The habitat and location of our body, its spatial characteristics (shape and size), its ways of moving11 and, in particular, the position 9 On the significance of this in the history of philosophy see Johnson (1987). On the Piaget– Chomsky debate on cognitive structures existing a priori or formed by experience, see PiattelliPalmarini (1980). 10 The interpretation of case government after prepositions through image schemata rather than features has proved profitable in other languages, such as Russian (cf. Nesset 2004: 291). 11 Some empirical evidence (Radden 1988: 381) suggests that the perception of motion is more fundamental than that of shape.


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and the characteristics of our organs of perception are all reflected in human languages. Heine et al. (1991a: 157) even suggested that the first conceptualized notion is one’s person, with space being an external reality that is conceptualized as an object. It is also clear that adpositions reflect the quantity of detail visually perceived by a human being. On the vertical axis, a distinction of [þcontact]/[contact] is often made between on and above; this is not done for under, and “le fait est universel” (Hjelmslev 1935: 132). Front and back usually make no [contact] distinction, and if the distinction is made, it is only in the front area. We must be aware, however, that all this may apply less or more to particular languages; the observation that language is anthropomorphic and ego-centric relies mainly on western languages and indeed on the western discourse on cognition (Levinson 2003: 9–13). The evidence that our characteristics as human beings affect the structure of the language(s) we speak has sparked off some (largely anti-generative) linguistic theories. The main school moving in this direction is that of Cognitive Linguistics, which sees our use of language as seated in our general cognitive apparatus (deixis being the basis) rather than as a separate faculty, as maintained by the Chomskyan school, which follows a modular conception of cognition (see Lakoff 1987: 58, Jackendoff 1978: 202, Sweetser 1990: 1). It also emphasizes that the impression that the outside world makes on our senses causes us to develop language in a particular way; the generative school, on the other hand, claims that language is a genetically-given faculty, and that language is clearly a biological organ (Chomsky 2000: 1–7), whose main characteristics are not due to external stimuli. In Cognitive Linguistics, the emphasis is shifted onto the “humanness”, or “human embodiment of understanding” (Johnson 1987: x), concluding that “Thought is embodied, that is, the structures used to put together our conceptual systems grow out of bodily experience and make sense in terms of it” (Lakoff 1987: xiv). The whole of our cognition, in the cognitivist view (cf. Varela et al. 1991: 147, Zelinski-Wibbelt 1993: 12ff.), is embodied. It is affected by our bodies, metaphorized from bodily experience; this means that our conception of the world is sensorial, not scientific (cf. Svorou 1994: 1; Evans and Green 2006: 46ff.), contrary to the traditional “objectivistic” view that semantic representation is propositional and truth-conditional.12 While we have no reason to 12 An example of the difficulties presented by the objective view is that different meanings of a polysemous word thus remain unaccountable for (Sweetser 1990: 4ff.), as they do not necessarily share objective truth conditions:

Œ ø ŒÆØ æ ø lit. ‘I cut and sew’ > ENTAILMENT “I know how to sew” Œ ø ŒÆØ æ ø idiom. ‘I rabbit on’ > * ENTAILMENT “I know how to sew”.

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assume that this is true of all languages, it is clearly true of English and Greek. There are ill-defined spatial characterizations in many languages that cannot be understood in objective terms but only through “common sense” (Varela et al. 1991: 147ff.), taking the non-objective nature of a human viewpoint into account. One instance is the concept of “region”, which will prove useful in the analysis of Modern Greek prepositions (p. 273–4). Its objective limits are practically undefinable, and depend not only on the physical, but also on the functional, interactional, and perceptive characteristics of the entities involved (Svorou 1994: 15). Cognitive Linguistics attributes a key role to metaphor, both synchronically and diachronically. Langacker (1987: 1) set the tone by claiming that “if figurative language were systematically eliminated from our database, little if any data would remain”; Johnson (1987: xiii) concurred that “embodied and imaginative structures” must receive a central place in any adequate account of meaning and rationality. Since the beginning of the 1980s, there has been a large amount of work on the pervasiveness of metaphors in our perception and conception of the world, essentially denying a reality beyond the subjective (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 159), in line with broader postmodern discourse. A number of recent studies have examined and emphasized the central role played by metaphor in our cognition (see, e.g., Ko¨vecses 2002), in our interpretation of reality, and in the way we express it linguistically. Reference is made to abstract structures of images (Gestalt structures, image schemata) involving bodily motions, perceptions, manipulations of and interactions with external entities. These have patterns, by which we give order to our experience of the world: language is based on this process. All this is relevant also to historical linguistics, because Cognitive Linguistics points out that metaphor is the key mechanism in language change (Croft and Cruse 2004: 193–211). Prescriptivists objecting to language change realized this instinctively: George Orwell’s rule against the decline of language was never to use a metaphor or a simile (Edwards 1995: 150). It is not surprising, although it is an oversimplification, that the basic approach of Cognitive Linguistics has been dubbed “generalized neo-localism” (Rastier 2006: 93); localists such as Anderson (1992: 71) indeed had argued that “abstract situations are conceptualized in these spatial terms. . . . Abstract domains are structured linguistically by space-based metaphor, including its ego-centric orientation”. Localists had preceded Cognitive Linguists also in interpreting transitivity (in line with the etymology of the term) as a flow of the energy or action (cf. Cienki 1995: 151–4). Cognitive Linguistics,


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in turn, has built upon localistic scholarship, exploring extensively the pervasiveness of metaphorization, noticing the role played by other elements of our perceptual world besides location, such as animacy, and drawing upon the idea of meanings being structured around a prototype, a theory which was explored in the 1970s (cf. Dahl 1979: 18).

2.7 Temporal and other meanings In the synchronic or diachronic development of meanings, where do temporal senses stand? Should they be classified together with spatial meanings? Traditional grammar groups both spatial and temporal meanings under the cover term “concrete”, or even “local” (e.g. Lyons 1979a: 298). Linguists who were determined to see language as a mirror of objective reality rather than as a reflection of human experience took the fact that physics could not distinguish space and time as proof that spatial and temporal notions must coincide in language too. Brndal (1940: 24) rejected the distinction between the two, making direct reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity. The fact that language had also often been described in terms specific to natural sciences may have contributed to this attitude. Some (e.g. Klein 1994: 1ff.) reiterated that time and space are equally fundamental to cognition, and indeed that time is more basic in the structural organization of language. Language is not physics, however. And as Piaget (1946: 2) had noted, space and time may be objectively “un tout indissociable”, but whereas space can be conceived regardless of time, the conceptualization of time depends on that of space. In language acquisition (cf. Adams 1885: 2; Mandler 1996: 374) the experience of space is not conceptualized at the same age as that of time. Jespersen (1922: 138) thought that children are confused by the fact that prepositions can be used either spatially or temporally, and cites a very young girl who, when told that she would be washed “in a moment”, replied that she needed to be washed “in the bath”; this, if it is not an exceptionally sophisticated word-play for a little child, attests a stage at which spatial meanings are used but temporal ones are not yet understood. Over a century ago, the classical study by Stern and Stern (1907: 231) stated that “Ortsadverbien viel fru¨her auftreten als die Zeitadverbien”, and expressed amazement at the fact that this had not been pointed out before. Studies in the 1970s (Clark 1973: 61; Grimm 1975: 110) confirmed that spatial terms are used spontaneously by children before temporal ones. Grimm (ibid.) reported that in her corpus of children’s use of (German) prepositions, (i) temporal Ps were fewer than local ones; (ii) all temporal Ps were also used as local ones (and the most used temporal Ps were also the most used local ones).

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As Stern and Stern (1907: 233) observed, expressions of time are in fact often transparently a metaphor of spatial images (in English as in their German examples): point in time, stretch of time, passing of time, long/short time, and as indeed the use of the prepositions before and after show (cf. also Lyons 1977: 718). Time is linguistically a “pseudospace” (Jackendoff 1983: 189, cf. also Anderson 1973a: 14), and it has been shown that languages commonly use originally spatial adpositions and cases to express time relations (Haspelmath 1997: 140). Finnish provides particularly transparent examples of this. The Finnish cases also have temporal meanings (Karlsson 1978: 119ff.). Their correspondences between spatial image and time reference intuitively make perfect sense: Inessive (inside) Elative (out of) Illative (into) Adessive (at) Essive (as) Ablative (from) Translative (becoming)

> within a given time: > time since when: > extension of time-span: > time at which: > also time at which: > going back to time: > time prearranged:

e.g. e.g. e.g. e.g. e.g. e.g. e.g.

‘finished within an hour’ ‘since 1966’ ‘(from day) to day’ ‘by day’, ‘next week’ ‘at Easter’ ‘next summer’ ‘dating from the fifth century’ ‘plans for the weekend’

The development from a local sense to a temporal one is sometimes a first step towards the creation of subordinating particles or mood markers. Spatial cases and prepositions are often used also with verbal forms. In Kannada (Madhta 1976: 141), the locative case, initially indicating a point in space and then a point in time, comes to be used to indicate temporal occurrence during the action indicated by the verb, on which it gets suffixed: mo¯hana mayda¯ninalli bidda lit. ‘Mohan in the playground fell’ avanu a¯duva samayadalli bidda lit. ‘he while playing fell’ _ In Hebrew too, the locative preposition d /b‰/ is used with a temporal meaning, prefixed to the “construct infinitive”. This use is often echoed in Biblical Greek, although “quamvis enim phrasis K fiH cum infinitivo sit omnino graeca, usus eius temporalis non est classicus sed hebraicus” (Zerwick 1949: 88). For example: (2.10)

ŒÆd Kª K fiH r ÆØ ÆPe K ØA fi H ºø . . . ‘and it came to pass, while/when he was in one of the cities, . . .’ (Luke 5:12)


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The manifold “infinitives” of Finnish (Karlsson 1978: 183ff.) receive case suffixes in a similar way. Relative clauses can be equivalent to case-marked verbal forms: kaupungissa ¼ in town

(2.11) Kun ha¨n oli while he bePAST3ps ole-ssa-ni kaupungissa be-INESSIVE-his in town ‘while he was in town’

Notice that the temporal case ending on the verb is the same local case suffix on the noun (data partly from Karlsson 1978: 188): (2.12) ha¨n on kirjasto-ssa he is library-INESSIVE ‘he is reading in the library’

lukema-ssa to read-INESSIVE

Icelandic uses “to be at” in order to say “to be doing”: (2.13)

hann er að lesa ‘he is [at] reading’

And so does Turkish (cf. also Bastuji 1976: 90): (2.14) okumak-ta-dır ‘to read-[LOC]-is’ > ‘he is reading’ Examples of how concrete spatial meanings can be extended to the temporal domain and to various grammatical domains could be multiplied endlessly; let us look at a few by way of example. Consider now prepositions and cases with a partitive sense. They may indicate not only a spatial but a temporal subsection of the referent object; for example in Polish (data partly from Wierzbicka 1983: 259–61): ja chce˛ parasol ja chce˛ parasola daj mi no´z˙ daj mi noz˙a

[ACCUSATIVE] [GENITIVE] [ACCUSATIVE] [GENITIVE]

‘I want the umbrella (for good)’ ‘I want the umbrella (for a moment)’ ‘give me the knife (for good)’ ‘give me the knife (for a moment)’

The function performed in Finnish (Karlsson 1978: 96) by the partitive case (as opposed to the accusative or the nominative) is to identify only a portion of a referent. However, the Finnish partitive has also come to be used as an aspectual (imperfective) marker, indicating a partially unfolded event. The Finnish partitive case was originally, and to a small degree still is, a local case;

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its evolution shows therefore a local origin for an aspectual (or Aktionsart) distinction. Contrast the pairs below: (2.15)

(2.16)

Finnish a Ulla luki la¨ksyn ‘Ulla did her homework’ b Ulla luki la¨ksya¨ ‘Ulla was doing her homework’ Finnish a Antti rakensi talon ‘Andy built the house’ b Antti rakensi taloa ‘Andy was building the house’

(accusative case) (partitive case)

(accusative case) (partitive case)

Both spatial and aspectual uses of the Finnish partitive correspond to the Swedish use of pa˚, a preposition indicating location on a portion of an object: (2.17) Swedish a Ulla la¨ste la¨xan ‘Ulla did her homework’ b Ulla la¨ste pa˚ la¨xan ‘Ulla was doing her homework’ (2.18) Swedish a Antti byggde huset ‘Andy built the house’ b Antti byggde pa˚ huset ‘Andy was building the house’

(no adposition) (with adposition)

(no adposition) (with adposition)

Temporal concomitance is expressed, in many languages, by comitative markers, which also indicate location. Examples include the Ancient and Koine´ Greek prepositions , – Æ and “with”, Modern Greek “with”—as well as, by coincidence, the synonymous Hebrew NS /im/ (Brown et al. 1906 (1952): 768a) and Latin cum: (2.19) Ancient Greek a æÆ fi (Pind.Pyth. 11.10) ‘at eve/as the evening comes’ lit. ‘with evening’ b – æÆ fi ‘when it was day’ lit. ‘with day’

(Thuc. 2. 94)

On the meaning of prepositions (2.20) Koine´ Greek Œøæ . . . Ł æÆ . . . ‘by night. . . . whereas by day. . . .’

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(Strabo 6.3.8) (cf. S¸tef 1970: 76)

(2.21) Modern Greek b c ¼ØÅ IŁÇı a ºıºØÆ ‘with [the coming of] spring, flowers bloom’ On the other hand, if followed by a contradictory sentence, comitative prepositions can be used as adversatives: Modern Greek Hebrew (Ne.5.18) Turkish

‹ºÆ ÆFÆ ‘with [¼despite] all that’ EG NS F ‘and with [¼despite] that’ bununla beraber / birlikte ‘together with [¼despite] that’

In Finnish, most other case endings can also be used on verbs (Karlsson 1978: 183ff.): (2.22)

(2.23)

Translative ha¨n tuli ‘(s)he came

Oxfordiin opiskellakseen filologiaa to Oxford to study philology’

Instructive (¼comitative) lapsi tuli kotiin itkien ‘the child came home crying’

(2.24) Instructive (¼instrumental) menimme sinne ka¨vellen ‘we went there walking’ (2.25)

Adessive (¼instrumental) menimme sinne ka¨velema¨lla¨ ‘we went there walking’

(2.26) Abessive ha¨n la¨hti kertomatta meille ‘(s)he left without telling us’ (2.27)

Elative ha¨n tuli syo¨masta ‘he [has] come from having-a-meal’

(2.28)

Illative menen ulos tanssimaan ‘I go out to dance’

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The last example is identical to the use of English to and of Hebrew M/l‰/, employed as: (i) allative/dative preposition (ii) final clause complementizer (iii) general infinitive marker Langacker (1992: 304ff.) argued that the English infinitival to has no goaldirected or spatial sense, and that there is no reason to identify it with the preposition to. This may be plausible synchronically, but does not weaken the argument that concrete spatial imagery is the origin of these grammatical structures. Lichtenberk (1991: 40) reports that in To’aba’ita (Austronesian) the ablative case marker has developed into a negative final complementizer (“in order not to”). In Bodic languages (Tibeto-Burmese) the evolution of local postpositions into subordinating conjunctions is also clearly attested (adapted from Genetti 1986: 387ff., 1991: 229): (2.29) Locative sense > ‘at’

temporal location > hypothetical/contrastive ‘when/while’ ‘if/although’

(2.30) Ablative sense > ‘from’

temporal sequence > cause ‘after/since’ ‘because’

(2.31)

Allative sense > ‘towards’

temporal extension > final ‘until’ ‘in order to’

Very common abstract concepts are thus expressed by prepositional (or case) constructions, and can be profitably interpreted in (diachronic) localistic terms.13 Let us consider two examples amply represented also in Greek prepositional usage.

2.8 Examples of spatial metaphors The notion of possession can be seen as a locative image; it is so described by a number of theoreticians (cf. e.g. Fillmore 1969: 16); the (traditionally termed) subject of English possession verbs has been analysed as dative (Anderson 1984: 242), and the subject of sentences like Harry kept my CD as locative (Allan 2001: 392). Furthermore, possession is transparently expressed

13 In many abstract phrases the original local sense is still transparent, or is still in use in other contexts; the border synchrony/diachrony is again blurred (cf. Miller 1984: 259).


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as location in several languages. “De fait avoir comme lexe`me est, dans le monde, une rarete´; la plupart des langues ne le connaissent pas. Au sein meˆme des langues indo-europeénnes, c’est une acquisition tardive” (Benveniste, 1960: 194ff.). Indeed, Greek and Latin adessive prepositions (also when used as preverbs) did have this possessive meaning: (2.32)

åÅ b PŒ k paqa art indeed (is)not being near you ‘what you have is not an art’

(2.33) x F c p›q- Ø to whom mind not near-is ‘who have no mind’ (2.34)

c peqd ºØ the about Philip ‘Philip’s tyranny’

(Pl. Ion 533D)

(Pl. Ion 534D)

(Xen. Hell. 5.4.2)

ıæÆÆ tyranny

(2.35) diuitiae apud illos sunt riches at them are ‘they have riches’

(Sall.Cat. 20.8)

The plain dative case of Latin and Classical Greek had this possessive sense on its own. So, “I have a book” was expressed as “to me is a book”: Classical Greek Latin Russian

K Ø º ¼ mihi est liber ¼ y vtyz tcnm rybuf ¼

º Øa åø librum habeo (z bvt˛ rybuy)

In many languages this spatial image is the only way to indicate possession, and there is no verb “to have”: Latvian

man ir gra¯mata ¼ ‘to-me is book’

*. . . . gra¯mata * ‘I have book’

An adposition with dative (¼ allative) sense is also used to indicate possession in languages of other families: Arabic Hebrew14

YUR JM J

‘exists to me book’

(allative P)

‘exists to me book’

(allative P)

14 In Modern Hebrew this construction is changing to YUR E Ð‘A JM J (est mihi librum with the Ð subject marked as object), probably under the influence of European languages (i.e. Yiddish). See Ziv (1976).

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It could be argued that the possessive sense of such allative expressions perhaps was arrived at through the sense of indirect object, such as “exists a book given to me” (although that meaning too is derived from an allative meaning), or through a beneficiary phrase like “exists a book for me” (although this too, ultimately, is of spatial origin). However, many other languages have other spatial expressions (not dative but locative, or comitative, or adessive) indicating ownership by proximity. Besides Greek and Latin prepositional phrases with Ææ and apud above, note also: Finnish South Welsh Swahili

minulla on kirja mae llyfr gyda fi nina kitabu

‘at me is book’ ‘with me book is’ ‘with me book’

(adessive case) (comitative P) (comitative P)15

Sometimes, within one language, different spatial constructions indicate possession with different features, such as duration, inalienability,16 or the like: Scots Gaelic tha leabhar leam

‘I have a book (borrowed/ (comitative P) momentarily)’ Scots Gaelic tha leabhar agam ‘I have a book (mine/for (adessive P) ever)’ We saw that Greek and other languages conceptualize possession (or rather, belonging) as a motion-to; but possession can also be expressed with an image of motion-from: a partitive expression. The conceptualization of possession as an image of partition or departure-from is seen in the prepositional use of Modern Greek and other European languages: English Spanish Dutch Modern Greek

of de van I

(compare off with full ablative meaning) (still used also in ablative sense—cf. Latin de) (still used also in ablative sense) (still used chiefly as ablative preposition)

The Modern Greek use of I as a possessive (instead of the genitive, as in the classical language) is still limited. In standard Modern Greek it only appears with inanimate objects, and with plural animals. Thus “the eggs of the chickens” is: Stand. Modern Greek a ÆPªa Ie d Œ Classical Greek a fiTa H OæŁø

(* a ÆPªa H ŒH) (* a Ie H OæŁø fiT)

15 Thus the same possessive construction rendered in South Welsh and in Swahili by a comitative adposition (Perrot 1950: 79) corresponds to adessive (or dative) adpositions or cases in other languages—perhaps further evidence of the affinity between locative and comitative notions. 16 On alienable and inalienable possession, see Lichtenberg (2005: 339ff.).


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In dialects, however, it has already spread to human possessors (in the standard language marked with the genitive). Thus “the father of the child” is: Stand. Mod. Greek › Æ æÆ F ÆØØF Thessalian dialect › Æ æÆ I f

(* › Æ æÆ Ie e ÆØ) (Amantos 1964: 215)

Since the Classical genitive was originally also ablative, the replacement of the genitive today by I indicates a cycle, whereby the same spatial image (possession conceptualized as a source) was adopted and, once lost, recreated.17 In English too, one can discern ablative possessive expressions (Miller 1985: 107): the insults of the crowd ¼ the insults (coming) from the crowd. In the speech of little children we hear constructions such as a finger from him or a mum from two babies (Clark and Carpenter 1989: 8). Even the verb “to have” itself is, in many languages that have one, transparently spatial: cf. Latin habeo and Spanish tengo “I hold > I have”. In Eastern Cushitic languages too (Heine et al. 1991a: 154) “to have” is “to seize”, and in Ewe (Benveniste 1960: 195) “to have” is expressed as “there is in somebody’s hands”: (2.36)

ga le asi-nye money is in-hands-my “I have money”

Given the locative basis of the concept of possession, the subject of “to have” could be regarded as an experiencer, rather than as an agent. The Latin habere and the Greek verb åø “to have” confirms this clearly. They can both be stative verbs: they are used intransitively to indicate that the subject feels or finds itself in a condition or place: Ancient Greek

H åØ; ‘how are [lit. have] you ?’

Latin

bene habet ‘that is [lit. has] fine’

(Ar.Eq. 7) (Livy 6.35.8)

Late Latin and post-Classical Greek also attests “have” used for “being somewhere”: (2.37) O IÅ F yæ ÆPe

ÆæÆ æÆ XÅ åÆ K fiH Å ø fi (John 11:17) ‘Jesus found him that had been [lit. had] in the grave already for four days’

17 Common Koine´ phrases expressing with an ablative construction ( Ææa F KØ º “your letter”) what would otherwise be rendered by the genitive also have a semantically justified origin: “the letter that came from you” (earlier meaning of Ææ þ ablative genitive) and “the letter written by you”, agentive (also common meaning of Ææ þ genitive, arguably derived from the ablative sense).

66 (2.39)

Background to Greek prepositions Siracusis habet ‘he lives [lit. has] in Siracusa’

(Arr.Menan.69)

The locative sense of “to have” is equally evident in Chinese. An ordinary locative phrase like “there is x at y” necessarily entails the use of “to have”: (2.40)

上有人 ‘there are people in the street’

which is parallel to Modern Greek: (2.41) f æ ı åØ in the streets has ‘there is traffic in the streets’

ŒÅ Å traffic

Note also the difference between the last sentence and: (2.42)

ƒ æ Ø åı ŒÅ Å (literal) ‘the streets have traffic’

When “the streets” are really the subject of the sentence (as in the latter example), there is a different number-agreement on the verb. When the verb åø is overtly existential/locative, it appears in the third person singular (cf. French il y a “there is” lit. “it there has”). It is, therefore, semantically equivalent to other existential verbs (although the noun is then the subject, not the object): (2.43)

f æ ı åØ ŒÅ Å ¼ f æ ı æåØ ŒÅ Å ‘in the streets there is traffic’

Indeed, åØ has an even stronger, more specific spatial sense than PæåØ; while one can say indifferently (example from Kazazis 1968: 84): (2.44) a åØ çÆ ÆÆ c ˇPÆºÆ; ‘are there ghosts in Wales?’ b æåı çÆ ÆÆ c ˇPÆºÆ; ‘are there ghosts in Wales?’ in a sentence of a more general kind, where location is not specified, and the meaning is more existential and less overtly locative, åØ would be incorrect: (2.45) a åØ çÆ ÆÆ; ‘do ghosts exist?’ b æåı çÆ ÆÆ; ‘do ghosts exist?’


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There is more. Traces of the locative/existential sense of “to have” can still be discernible even when “to have” is used as a perfect auxiliary: “le parfait est bien, notamment dans les langues indoeuropeénnes, une forme d’e´tat eńonçant possession” (Benveniste 1960: 201). This is conspicuous in all the languages that form the perfect with “to have” þ a passive participle. Note the close relation between the two sentences (2.46) a I have parked my car there b I have my car parked there In (2.46a), parked is a “perfect-formant”, and in (2.46b) it is an apposition (¼ part) of the object of the verb of possession. The same occurs in Italian and Modern Greek: (2.47) a Ho parcheggiato la macchina lı´ b Ho la macchina parcheggiata lı´ åø ÆæŒÆæØ e I Ø KŒE åø e I Ø ÆæŒÆæØ KŒE Italian and Modern Greek even have a construction that has both meanings: (2.48) la macchina l’ ho parcheggiata lı´ e I Ø Zåø ÆæŒÆæØ KŒE Note that the “perfect-formant” in the last two examples needs to agree in gender with the noun, which proves that it is (an apposition of) the object of the verb. All this is pertinent to our investigation of prepositions, because some languages in which possession is expressed with a locative prepositional construction (rather than with a verb “to have”), use the same possessivelocative construction even in sentences that correspond to the use of the English “to have”, not as a possessive verb, but as a mere auxiliary for the ´ Croínıń 1961: 39): perfect. For instance, in Irish (cf. also Dillon and O Irish

Ta´ leabhar agam Ta´ se´ agam Ta´ se´ deánta agam

‘I have a book’ (lit. ‘is book with-me’) ‘I have it’ (lit. ‘is it with-me’) ‘I have done it’ (lit. ‘is it done with-me’)

A perfect tense entails a locative predication, which means that a local notion is the origin of an expression of tense. This can also be seen in Latin. The following phrase may have possessive or agentive meaning: Tibi est liber scriptus

lit. ‘to you is a book written’ # ‘you own a written book’ ‘a book has been written by you’

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In Portuguese, tenho “hold” replaced the derivative of Latin habere as a possession verb, but it has also come to be used as a new perfect auxiliary. In Armenian, there is also a “possessive” way to construct perfect tenses that does not even involve the use of the verb “to have”. Completed action by a transitive verb, in Armenian, can be expressed by an impersonal periphrasis consisting of a past (aorist) participle and an auxiliary verb—not “to have” but “to be”, although “to have” is used in other constructions. In this construction with “to be”, which looks in every way like a standard possessive construction, the logical subject appears in the genitive case. Benveniste (1960: 201) pointed out that this idiosyncratic genitive can be simply explained as marking the possessor, and pointed out that a further parallel between this construction with “to be” and compound perfect tenses based on the verb “to have” (familiar to us from English or Greek) is that both “to have” and “to be” (in Greek and in some other languages) can be also used as verba existentiae. The link possession-existence goes further. Let us start by noting another kind of possessive construction. Many languages (again, having no verb “to have”) render “I have a book” by an existential expression with a possessive marker: Sanskrit Hungarian Turkish

mama pustakam asti van egy ko¨nyvem kitabım var

‘of me book is’ ‘is one book-my’ ‘book-my existing’

So, instead of saying that “a book is to/at/near me” they say that “my book exists”. This fact introduces the second type of spatially-based constructions that we can fruitfully analyse here: expressions of existence. The crucial point (also shown by Greek) is that any existential construction can be seen as spatial in origin, as it expresses subsistance in a deictically neutral location: (2.49) ØÅØŒc ªaæ pou´ Kstim poetics in fact somewhere is e ‹º in general ‘An (art of) poetry in general exists’

(Pl. Ion 532C)

Johnson (1987: 39) asserts that “to hold a proposition is to be located in a definite bounded space”; again, nihil sub sole novum. Plato had said:


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e B åæÆ . . . IÆªŒÆE r Æ ı e k –Æ ØØ ø fi ŒÆd ŒÆ å åæÆ Ø, e b K ªfi B ı ŒÆ PæÆe Pb r ÆØ. Space . . . everything that exists is necessarily somewhere, in some place and occupying some space; what is neither on earth nor somewhere in the sky is nothing. (Pl. Ti. 52b)

Aristotle’s view was not different from Plato’s: ! ªaæ ZÆ ºÆ ı Ø r Æ ı . . . e ªaæ c k PÆ F r ÆØ. Everybody assumes that the things that exist are somewhere . . . what does not exist is nowhere. (Arist. Ph. IV, 208 a 29)

In rabbinic writings, the Hebrew word NF XO /ma:qom/ “place” has been, since very early (cf. Urbach 1987: 66–75), used as a name of God, notably in the Mishnah and the Talmud. The conception of God implied by this name is explained by the rabbis: wOmwOqm; wOmlfwO( Ny)'w: wOmlfwO( l#$e wOmwOqm; )w%h#$e MwOqmf wOtwO) Ny)ir:wOqw: ... wOmwOqm; wOmlfwO( Ny)'w: wOmlfwO( MwOqmf )w%h K7w%rb%f #wOdq%FhF ... wOnwO(m; wOmlfwO( Ny)'w: wOmlfwO( l#$e wOnwO(m; )w%h K7w%rb%f #wOdq%FhF

We call him “Place” because he is the place of his universe, and his universe is not his place . . . the Holy One, blessed be he . . . is the place of the universe, and his universe is not his place . . . the Holy One, blessed be he . . . is the abode of the universe and his universe is not his abode. (Bereshit Rabba 68:11)

The epithet NF XO /ma:qom/ describes God not so much as contained and present everywhere (as in the Christian tradition) but as the container of everything; thus everything existing or conceivable is located in space, in (as God is called) “the Place”.18 Philo (Som. 1.63), a Greek-speaking Jew, confirmed: “this God is called Place because he contains everything” (ÆPe › Łe ŒÆºEÆØ fiH æØ åØ b a ‹ºÆ); but perhaps he had antecedents in Greek philosophy: Aristotle (Physics 3.4.203) says that Anaximander and the physicists had stated that the divine “appears to contain everything” (ŒE ŒÆd æØ åØ –ÆÆ). And, as noted in an unrelated argument by Piaget: mais l’espace lui-meˆme n’est pas un simple “contenant”. Il est l’ensemble des rapports établis entre les corps que nous percevons ou concevons, ou, pour mieux dire, l’ensemble des relations dont nous nous servons pour structurer ces corps. but space in itself is not just a container. It is the whole of the relations between the bodies that we perceive or conceive of—or, to put it better, the whole of the relations that we use in order to structure those bodies. (Piaget 1946: 1) 18 The Hebrew term for “universe”, NM F S /ola:m/, word of obscure etymology, also means /ma:qom/(God/ “eternity”. Since NM FS /ola:m/ (universe/eternity) is said to be contained in NF XO space), one implication could be that all time is contained in space (cf. pp. 57–8).

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The idea that all that exists is located somewhere is patent in the English there is (not) which means both “it is (not) in that place” and “it (does not) exist(s)”. Likewise: Standard Turkish Modern Arabic Colloquial Arabic

var ‘being there’ > ‘existing’ /huna:ka/ ‘there’ > ‘it exists’ /fi:/ ‘in’ > ‘there is’ (Shehadi 1969: 123)

In Swahili too, existential (and possessive) constructions are locative (Christie 1970: 170ff.). In Chadic languages, the evolution of prepositions into copula has been proven (Frajzyngier 1986: 371ff.). Some semantic analyses of English (Allan 2001: 400) accept that the use of to be to indicate a quality or status should be classified as locative; Finnish has a distinct essive case for that (laä¨ka¨ri-na¨ “as a doctor”) which has indeed local origin, and still has locative uses. Empiricist philosophers of the twentieth century (Lyons 1967: 391) have described existential statements as deictic—logically tantamount to a pointing gesture; in the evolution of language, Corballis suggested (2002:175) that “in the beginning was the gesture”, not the word, which came later, and he highlighted (2003: 207–10) how iconic gesticulation is still an important, elaborate supplement to speech, even when we cannot be seen, for instance on the phone, and gestures replace speech very efficiently when we cannot be heard. Languages that are more manifestly iconic, like sign languages, show that the local basis goes much further. In American Sign Language, locative or directional verbs are the basis of the entire grammatical system of the language (Gee and Kegl 1982: 336). There are plenty of other “abstract” meanings that can be brought within the scope of localism. In some instances the spatial image underlying an abstract concept is in fact transparent enough not to require further analysis: source-movements can be the expression of causes, as these are the origins of their effect, in Greenlandic (Fortescue 1984: 218) as in Greek, as in Arabic; expressions of means or manner can be conceived as perlative movements: cf. English the way, through, via, and so forth. Events are described as taking up space: many European languages, including English, express the concept of “happening” as taking place (Modern Greek ºÆ Ø åæÆ, Italian aver luogo, Swedish a¨ga rum, etc.). Localistic analyses have been taken far beyond prepositions: comparatives and infinitives are said to have been easily brought into line (Miller 1985: 120) and demonstratives (cf. e.g. De Mulder 1992), not unlike tense (see Lyons 1977: 718ff., Anderson 1973b: 33ff.) and aspect (see Comrie 1976:


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98ff., 129ff., Anderson 1973a, 1994: 2280b), epistemic modality (Lyons 1979: 112ff.).

2.9 Explaining polysemy The question of polysemy is central to the problem of identifying (if it exists) a type of meaning that is psychologically primary. In synchronic terms, the expression of spatial relations usually constitutes only one of the functions of a given preposition or case form. In grammar books, in the teaching of foreign languages, and in traditional linguistics, as Taylor (1989: 109) pointed out, prepositional polysemy was reduced to homonymy. One was given the impression that word meaning is a collection of unrelated (in fact, equidistant) meanings that just happen to be expressed by the same form. But if we postulate that prepositions do have intrinsic meaning (rather than being empty markers receiving some semantic value from the context), we are bound to doubt that multiplicity of senses is random and accidental. Earlier philologists (e.g. Harrison 1858: 6), instinctively felt that it was unsatisfactory “to cut the knot” by saying that a preposition can have unrelated and even opposite meaning in itself. Can polysemy literally be polysemy? The Ancient Greek answer, it seems, would be negative: (2.50) e ªaæ c <Ø> Å ÆØ PŁb Å ÆØ K (Arist. Metaph.III, 4, 1006b) ‘for not to mean one thing alone is to mean nothing’ Polysemy is so pervasive that it does not surprise us, but it is perfectly legitimate for us to ask why it should occur at all. If it really is unmotivated and haphazard, it is also anti-economical. So, is there a reason for a language to use the same term for different items—for instance, to express different relations with the same prepositions? The most plausible answer is that if a language tends to file under the same lexical label different entities (objects, situations, etc.), it is because there is a similarity among them. This is also the starting point of a localistic interpretation: localists . . . interpret contrasts in syntax and/or morphology as signalling contrasts in meaning. A lack of syntactic or morphological contrast is taken as indicating a basic meaning underlying all the uses of a particular syntactic or morphological construction. (Miller 2001: 21, cf. Anderson 2006: 116)

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The key to comprehending polysemy is our tendency to re-apply images to new concepts, to graft the structure of one semantic field onto other (especially abstract) domains—what Jackendoff (1978: 218) had called “cross-field generalizations”, already well described by Becker (1841: 212). Polysemy is a semantic extension, possibly starting from a spatial image, “by devices of the human imagination” (Johnson 1987: xii; cf. also Lakoff 1987: xiv). It is based on the ability and the tendency of our cognition to perceive an overall analogy—“das Gemeinsame sehen”, as Wittgenstein (1958: }72) put it; in other words, to categorize. This is a central function of language, since “if linguistics can be said to be any one thing, it is the study of categories” (Labov 1973: 342). The traditional view was that the world is a continuum, and that divisions and categorizations are just something that our language teaches us to do, arbitrarily. The stock example regularly quoted as proof of this (from Bloomfield 1933: 140 to Lyons 1977: 253) was the lexical partition of the spectrum of colours. Colours are indeed a continuum—the human eye can distinguish up to 7.5 million gradations, and languages differ greatly in the way they apportion segments of the range, and classify them as one colour. A famous and crucial blow to this example of linguistic relativity, however, was dealt by a study that demonstrated that although the boundaries of colours (as labelled by languages) may vary, the foci of colour categories do not waver across languages any more than they do across idiolects of one language (Berlin and Kay 1969: 5ff.): languages may disagree as to whether a particular tinge should be classified as a given colour or another, but agree as to what is “the best, most typical example of x” (ibid: 7)—in other words, its prototype. Basic colours do exist: they are identified more readily in psychological tests, have morphologically simpler names, cannot be subsumed under other names of colours, have wider application, and appear in all idiolects of a given language (ibid: 5). Even children, or speakers of languages that have no names for focal colours, pick them out most easily (see Lakoff 1987: 24ff.). This means that, linguistically, a word may designate several things, but one is the primary specimen. The Berlin and Kay view of focal colours as psychologically more salient is controversal to this day (cf., e.g., Saunders and van Brakel 2001) but it has influenced linguistic theories ever since it was first launched (cf. Evans and Green 2006: 97). Labov’s celebrated experiment (Labov 1973: 348), in which he asked participants to classify pictures of various drinking containers, showed the lack of steady boundaries between categories, but confirmed the existence of ideal examples, of prototypes. Categories coalesce at their borders—like the Begriff mit verschwommenen Ra¨ndern of Wittgenstein (1958: } 71), but their foci are kept maximally distinct. If we assume that language is organized in the same way as our cognition, it becomes clear why a word,


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amongst its diverse range of meanings, can be said to have a core one. Linguistically, there is a ‘basic level of categorization’ (Taylor 1989: 48), the lexical description by a term both sufficiently specific and sufficiently simple: not as vague as artefact, not as particular as kitchen chair, but prototypically, chair. Such terms are learnt earlier, and are morphologically simpler. Linguistic evidence does indicate the existence of concepts with blurred edges, degrees across continua, and contextual influences; this is radically against the classical view of categories as “discrete, absolute and pristine” (Givoń 1986: 77) found in Plato, Descartes or, mutatis mutandis, Chomsky, and against their emphasis on a priori, pre-sensorial knowledge.19 The classical view is that either something belongs to a category or it does not: PŒ ÆØ r ÆØ ŒÆd c r ÆØ e ÆP . . . Pb Æf IØç ø K åÆØ r ÆØ PŁ , Iºº IªŒÅ j çÆØ j IçÆØ It is not possible to be and not to be the same thing . . . nor is it possible that there be anything between contradictory (predicates), but one (must) necessarily either assert or deny. (Arist. Metaph. III, 4, 1006b and III, 7, 1011b)

According to this conception, belonging to a category means to share given traits. A compromise view—that members of a category are indeed all related but not through sharing a common element—is Prototype Theory, advocated by cognitive linguists such as Givoń and Lakoff, as well as by cognitive psychologists such as Rosch, and anthropologists like Berlin and Kay. Fillmore too, perhaps more surprisingly, became increasingly sympathetic to a prototype-based approach to meaning (Fillmore 1977b: 80ff., 1977d: 104ff.), rather than the traditional one based on sets of propositions, resembling a checklist. A localistic view of the semantic development of prepositions would posit a Grundbedeutung, as termed by Jakobson (1936: 240ff.), with various possible abstract reflexes, also making room for contextual semantic influences that create combinatory variants (Jakobson’s Sonderbedeutungen). A localistic view would not assign a global meaning to all uses of a preposition, a Gesamtbedeutung (which Jakobson favoured), because that could not be clearly spatial. In the cognitive view (cf. also Croft and Cruse 2004: 76–96), meaning is a radially-structured network: there is a core item from which other ones are spawned (cf. also Dirven 1993). The relation of the derived members to the prototypical element becomes less obvious as the chain expands: outer items (Lakoff 1987: 84) cannot be predicted, and have to be learnt. Cognitivists accuse the traditional approach of giving only an isolated view of categories, so that “one literally cannot see the forest for the trees” (Janda 1993: 6). The intuition that concepts can issue from one another in a 19

On Cognitive Grammar in opposition to Generative Grammar, see also Langacker (1987: 4ff.).

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M1

M2

M3

M4

T FIGURE 2.2

sort of chain, so that their relatedness may be obscured, first appears in Wittgenstein (1958: I: }66ff.); searching for a comprehensive definition of “game” (note that the German noun “Spiel” has a wider sense than the English “game”), Wittgenstein came to explain the relation between various senses of “game” comparing it to genetic chains: the “family resemblance” found among blood relations, whose “Verwandtschaft ist dann ebenso unleugbar wie die Verschiedenheit” (ibid.: }76). If semantic evolution is seen as a chain, after the “family relations” model, we can explain why new meanings co-exist with old ones and, above all, why distant relatives may seem to have nothing in common (Figure 2.2). Along these lines we could explain how prepositions gradually develop a bewilderingly varied array of meanings, some of which seem to have no direct relation between them. Traditionally, the lack of common traits between two uses of the same word has been taken as proof of homonymity, rather than polysemy.20 With the interpretation of polysemy as a network of family-like relation, the alleged meaninglessness of prepositions and case forms, which we considered earlier, becomes all the more untenable: “that prepositions are meaningful even as ‘purely grammatical’ elements follows directly from basic tenets of the theory . . . [of] cognitive grammar” (Langacker 1992: 287). Thus, for instance, while Chomsky (1986a: 87) says that of is “semantically empty” and can be used as an inherent case marker—an idea accepted by most generativists and other linguists (cf. Vincent 1999: 1114)—Langacker argues (1992: 296) that “of has a discernible meaning even in its periphrastic use, and that its grammatical function reflects and exploits its semantic value”.

20

This is not to say that homonymy does not exist; there are numerous documented instances of morphological differences being obliterated by phonological changes, resulting in different meanings being expressed by what came to look like the “same” word. Just to quote a example that is remarkable in that it involves antonyms, the Old English verbs lætan “to allow, permit, release” and lettan “to hinder, impede, obstruct” both developed into Modern let; the first meaning prevailed, but remnants of its opposite survive in formal language (e.g. “without let or hindrance”, meaning “obstruction”), and in pre-modern usage (e.g. “I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me” in Hamlet 1.4, meaning “I’ll kill who tries to hinder me”).


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Studies on the prepositions of other languages, such as French (Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot and Kemmer 1995: 220) have, similarly, concluded that there are no semantically “empty” prepositions, as normally claimed, and that even the stock examples of French de and a` þ infinitive are semantically motivated.

2.10 Parallel and different metaphorizations Often, the same metaphor can be found cross-linguistically, and this is frequent in prepositional usage. Many spatial images have been used by speakers of unrelated languages to express the same non-spatial concept. Consider, in various languages, the non-spatial sense of adpositions indicating a position below or under an object: English Swedish Hungarian Mod.Greek

the road is under construction va¨gen a¨r under ombyggnad az u´t épı´te´s alatt van › æ r ÆØ u“pe ŒÆÆ Œı

English Swedish Hungarian Mod.Greek Albanian Romanian Italian

they lived under oppression for four centuries De levde under fo¨rtryck i fyra a˚rhundraden elnyoma´s alatt e´ltek na´gy év sza´zadig (Keresztes, ibid.) Ç Æ u“pe [or j›ty Ipe] ŒÆÆ Å ªØa

æØ ÆNH ata jetuan ne¨n shtypje pe¨r kate¨r shekuj ei au tra˘it sub opresiune timp de patru sute de ani Vissero sotto oppressione per quattro secoli

(Keresztes 1975: 24)

If we view language as developed from non-language-specific human experience, we can see why many metaphors are extremely common across languages. Certain images (i.e. metaphors) are perceived by humans as capturing certain concepts particularly well, and seem to “make sense” more readily. Speakers across time and space have conceptualized a number of notions quite consistently. The images of motion thither to express purpose, for instance, is found in countless languages, and the image of motion thence with reference to causes is equally common. A causal/agentive meaning is expressed in Modern Greek by I (in Ancient Greek occasionally by KŒ), and with prepositions meaning “from” in countless languages (see p. 70). Standard English indicates causation and agency with by, but children between two and four instinctively express it with prepositional metaphors of source. Clark and Carpenter (1989: 1ff.) report phrases such as

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I’m tired from her (¼of) He’s really scared from Tommy (¼by/of) I was caught from you (¼by) Arrested from the soldiers (¼by) I cried a bit from you go (¼because you left) Children at this stage do use the preposition by, but only in its spatial sense; the use of from is also initially only local (Clark and Carpenter 1989: 10), and temporal senses appear much later. In Black vernacular (Sommer 1991: 195) we find analogous constructions: (2.51)

I hit a teacher from pushing around my sister i.e. ‘I hit a teacher because (of his) pushing around my sister’

So it would seem that there is some rationale and common sense in adpositional and case meaning. The only seeming snag, as we saw (pp. 36–7), is that a given meaning is at times expressed by different adpositions across languages (or dialects), and by different adpositions at various stages in the history of the same language. Different spatial metaphors ultimately expressing the same sense may even co-exist within one language at the same time. This is because “[w]hile two words may be distributionally and referentially equivalent, they may nevertheless be associated with distinct prototypes” (Taylor 1989: 56). For example, the notion of change is regularly expressed by an image of motion. The Ancient Greek ŒÅ Ø “movement” also meant “change” ( Æ º) whereas Mæ Æ “stillness” was equal to I Æ ºÅ Æ “immutability”, and (2.52)

A Æ Æ º K Ø Œ Ø Y Ø (Arist. Ph. 225a1) ‘every change is out of something into something’

However, in the genesis of expressions of change, the point of deixis may vary. So in English one says both become mad and go mad, and in Italian one can say both divenire pazzo or andar fuori pazzo. The intransitive meaning “to happen” is an even more common development for both the verbs “to go” and “to come” (sometimes with a prefix). Examples of the former are Greek ı Æø, Lithuanian (i˛)vykti, German vorgehen. Examples of the latter are English come (about), Turkish gelmek, Hebrew Ad /ba:/, Italian avvenire, German vorkommen. The verbs “to come” and “to go” are also used to indicate future tense in a number of languages (see Bybee et al. 1991: 59), including English. This is a clear instance of spatial images being the basis of tense distinctions, and the fact that both directions (coming and going) can be used in this way is because divergent metaphorizations of time are possible (see Clark 1973: 51):

On the meaning of prepositions (i) work hard in the days ahead [of now] (ii) work hard in the days ahead of Christmas

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¼ after ¼ future ¼ before ¼ past

Of the two opposite spatial metaphors, one imagines us moving towards the future, one imagines time moving towards us (cf. also Haspelmath 1997: 21; Evans and Green 2006: 84–7). The image of time as a vertical line is also used (Traugott 1974: 290), again, with motion in both directions being possible: with the future higher or lower than the present: (iii) from antiquity right down to the eighteenth century (iv) from last month up to the end of the year In prepositional usage, therefore, synonymous constructions based on opposite spatial images are not an indication of randomness or arbitrariness: they simply indicate a divergent structuring of meaning chains. Meaning, as we saw, is a conceptualization (Langacker 1992: 287) and the spatial image chosen to express a concept may vary (cf. also Zelinski-Wibbelt 1993: 3ff.). For example, both the Turkish words neye and neden correspond to English “why”. The former is the dative/allative of the inanimate interrogative pronoun, the latter the ablative. Thus they start from two opposite images: ne-ye ‘to what’ ¼ ne-den ‘from what’ ¼

‘to what purpose’ ¼ ‘from what cause’ ¼

why? why?

The former is parallel to Hebrew EOM /lama/ “to what > why”, the latter to Romanian de ce “from what > why”. The notion of “why” can also be expressed by other spatial images: a perlative motion can express reason, and through this metaphor we get the Greek ØÆ and the French pourquoi, not unlike the Romanian pentru ca˘ (from Latin *per intra que). Romanian, in fact, has other “identical-yet-opposite” constructions, such as the following two sentences, both meaning “the child is the offspring of the man”: este (2.53) a Copilul child-the is

pui de om offsp. from man

b Copilul este pui child-the is offsp.

al omului to man-the

Observe also the two synonymous prepositional constructions that Hebrew uses with superlatives: “the greatest of ” can be rendered as O MD e E Ð d MD e E Ð

/hagga:ðo:l m‰/ /hagga:ðo:l b‰/

lit. ‘the great(est) from . . .’ lit. ‘the great(est) in . . .’

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These two originally opposite but eventually equivalent phrases also exist in English: “the greatest of ” really means “the greatest out of ” (ablative), and is synonymous with “the greatest among” (locative). Conversely, the same spatial expression can describe opposite events, through different semantic routes: Lee (2001: 33) noted that “the sun is out” means “burning bright” while “the fire is out” means it is extinguished, but that this depends on whether the viewpoint is inside or outside the referent area, so the sun is coming into view, and the fire is going out of sight. The interpretation advocated by Cognitive Linguistics is said to be able to identify motivations behind metaphors but to be very weak in predictive power (Janda 1993: 5). This is essentially true: semantic developments are not safely predictable, because “Anything can, in principle, be like anything else” (Taylor 1989: 90); semantic change is based on metaphor, and is therefore principled and motivated (cf. Lakoff and Brugman 1986; Bernd 1997: 3), even in idioms (Lakoff 1987: 448), but it is not automatic. In sum, it is opaque if the history of a word is not known. In this sense, polysemy (the co-existence of mutually exclusive meanings in the same word) becomes homonymy (the existence of two homophonous and homographous but distinct words of mutually exclusive meanings). The distinction between polysemy and homonymy is therefore unsatisfactory, because it is based on diachronic information alone—or the whims of the lexicographer. As Taylor (1989: 104) notes, with the exception of known cases of different etymologies, there are no readily available tests for distinguishing homonymy from polysemy; and the average speaker is usually not aware of the diachrony of a word. Jackendoff (2002: 340) maintained that, since semantic developments in a chain are such that one cannot trace the connection betweeen two attested meanings without knowing the intervening steps, a (historically) single polysemous word like bank in river bank and savings bank represents separate homonymous concepts listed separately in the lexicon.

2.11 Additional factors affecting prepositional meaning In the expression of a concrete spatial relation, the choice of adposition (or case or of a combination thereof) is linked to certain characteristics of the referent object, such as relative position, direction, and dimensions. Other physical aspects can be influential, and these may include: orientation, namely horizontal or vertical direction, which in Ancient Greek could determine the choice between K and I; contact (or lack thereof) as in the contrast between English on and above and Modern Greek Kø and Kø I; singularity–duality–plurality, which distinguish between and


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among(st); part/whole (even when the whole is a collective) opposing Ancient Greek accusative and genitive (including with prepositions), or partitive and accusative case in Finnish; animacy, which decides, for instance, whether Modern Greek prepositions like Kø, ºÆ, Œø can or cannot take a referent in the form of a weak genitive pronoun (p. 259); definiteness, as we saw (p. 13–14) in the use of Spanish a and of the Turkish “accusative”. But there is another kind of determinant that we need to bear in mind about adpositional meaning. It is unrealistic to presuppose that in a prepositional phrase of local sense the factors dictating the choice of preposition are just location, physical characteristics, and, at a stretch, the position of the observer. There are also contextual factors of a more subjective or pragmatic nature that may decide which preposition is selected (cf. Wege 1991: 276ff.). These include the way speakers conceptualize the object at the moment of speaking. For instance, in Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, location on islands is indicated with the preposition pa˚. Location in a country or state, on the other hand, is expressed by the preposition i. Thus in Swedish one says: (2.54)

de bor i Sverige/i Danmark ‘they live in Sweden/in Denmark’ ˚ land (2.55) de bor pa˚ Mallorca/pa˚ A ‘they live in Mallorca/in A˚land’

the difference being that the latter pair are isles—and they belong to larger political units. By the same token, it had always been customary to say (2.56)

de bor pa˚ Island ‘they live in Iceland’

because Iceland is an island. Since Iceland gained independence, however, the choice of the preposition has become a touchy subject; continental Scandinavians still tend to say ‘pa˚ Island’, but the Icelanders object: the politically correct construction is now “i Island”. Obviously the referent noun, Iceland, and its dimension, shape, and location are unaltered: only its conceptualization has changed—or, at least, it is supposed to have. Everyday English is full of instances of prepositional selection unpredictable from the object’s concrete characteristics. Let us see some examples— mostly from Herskovits (1981: 303ff.) and from Miller and Johnson-Laird (1976: 383): “the train is in the station” and “the train is at the station” refer to the same objects in the same spatial positions, but conceived differently;

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Background to Greek prepositions “he is at the hospital”, is likewise different (but not spatially) from “he is in the hospital”; similarly, it is the conception of the dimensions, but not the dimensions in themselves that changes in “in the water/under the water”; in pairs like “the crack in the bowl”/“the milk in the bowl” the exact location within the second object is identified according to the nature of the first object (Figure 2.3); about a light on the ceiling we say “a bulb in the socket” and not “under” it, solely for reasons of relevance; a book on top of a pile placed on a table is said to be “on” the table, although not in contact with it (Figure 2.3); in some cases we even say the opposite of the truth: with reference to a pile of books in an open box, those well above its limits are still said to be in it, although they are outside it (Figure 2.3).

The milk and the crack “in the bowl”

The book not on the table and yet “on the table”

The books out of the box nonetheless “in the box”

FIGURE 2.3

Herskovits thus highlights that prepositional usage to indicate location can always be rather arbitrary: any definition of the “core meaning” of in could never predict its use to describe a location outside the reference object, as for our box of books. Knowledge of the world and pragmatic factors add to the lexical meaning of the preposition. In the same way, prepositions indicating the position of an object by its location on one of the orientational axes of another object, such as in front of, termed “projective” by Herskovits (1981: 321), as opposed to “topological” prepositions like on, can have their zero point set in either of two locations: the body of the observer or the reference object (cf. also Zelinski-Wibbelt 1993: 6ff.), ascribing to the reference object anthropomorphic characteristics (Figure 2.4). This further confirms that any description of location is modelled on the human body and its subjective perception. The choice of the zero points depends on whether the object has characteristics that lend themselves easily to metaphors of the human body. If it has, the first interpretation given is non-deictical—that is, a phrase like the man is in front of the house is preferentially processed taking the object as point of view (Cuyckens 1984:


The man in front of the house (zero point: the observer's body)

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The man in front of the house (zero point: the reference object)

FIGURE 2.4

192), although the other option is also available; if the reference object does not have a canonical orientation (a mountain, a ball) the deictic interpretation will automatically be selected.

2.12 The ex silentio argument for spatial primacy To appreciate the spatial basis of the meaning of cases and adpositions, another simple fact can be considered. It is a fact that has always been under our eyes. Many non-spatial notions—including highly consequential ones—do not seem to have autonomous expression. They are rendered only through constructions (such as adpositions) that also have spatial sense. Thus, for example, agency is usually expressed by adpositions or cases indicating source (Modern Greek I, German von, Italian da, Romanian de, Latin ab, Hebrew PJO ) or, less commonly, path movement (English by, French par, Dutch door, Spanish por). As de Boer (1983: 911) casually observed: “Although . . . common in the world’s languages, there does not seem to be any specialized preposition for it in any language.” That such a common and basic notion should not have its own adposition or case (discounting rare languages in which an erstwhile spatial expression may have come to be used exclusively as an agency marker) can easily be explained localistically: the primary sense is spatial (while agency is a syntactic notion) and agency therefore cannot be the first meaning of a case or adposition. There is a further point to be noted here, which leads us into the next chapter. In the particular instance of Modern Greek I, we also happen to have historical data corroborating this hypothesis: the local use of I is very ancient and the agentive sense is a more recent development barely attested in antiquity. This, nonetheless, does not prove that the same is true of prepositions for which we have no suitable diachronic documentation.

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Another key point is that, even if one doubts that diachronic evidence of a local first meaning is proof of the synchronic primacy of local meanings, one must admit that it fits with that conjecture. Our focus here is historical, but it will become increasingly obvious that diachronic evidence for localism makes synchronic localism appear more plausible.21 After all, a semantic change in the diachrony of a language occurs because, at some point, there has been a shift within the synchrony. Some believe that there is another principle, by which the spatial sense of adpositions and cases endowed with both concrete and non-concrete meanings should be regarded as primary: “whereas non-spatial meanings can easily be derived (synchronically) from spatial ones, it is difficult to see how the latter could be derived from the former” (Miller 1985: 123). According to this view, for example, for Modern Greek I “from; (inter alia) by an agent”, we should a priori regard the spatial meaning of motion-from as the basic one, and the agentive sense as derivative, because it would be much harder to explain the opposite semantic development, with spatial meanings being the derivative ones. However, the idea that diachronic change is unidirectional is supported by copious but not quite all evidence, as we see next.

2.13 The direction of semantic change A study in the semantic history of prepositions from late Old English to Middle English (Lundskær-Nielsen 1993: 185, 81) found that abstract meanings develop and increase in frequency with the passing of time. The direction of historical development is usually the same in all systems of communication: from iconic to symbolic; as Vincent (1980: 55–8) observed, this applies also to pictographic scripts and to the development of sign languages; the direction of the development means that we usually get grammaticalization, not de-grammaticalization. It is extremely rare for grammatical items to get lexicalized and, as Miller (1985: 124) noted, it is virtually unknown for spatial meanings to be acquired by prepositions or case inflections with an original non-spatial meaning. But a little caution is required. There are, in fact, reported instances of prepositions becoming (or re-becoming) adverbs: they are documented in Icelandic (Blaisdell 1959: 44) and in Latin (e.g. ultra, subter, secus, intra); there also attested instances of affixes becoming clitic words (cf. Joseph 2003: 485). All this raises questions about the status of grammaticalization as an 21 It is possible to be more daring (Miller 1985: 94, 118) and to accept a diachronic local-to-abstract development as ground for positing a synchronic localistic interpretation.


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independent force in language change, something that has been conceded even by the main proponents of grammaticalization (Traugott 2001: 1–4). There is, in fact, an ongoing debate as to whether grammaticalization exists as a comprehensive teleological mechanism, in which “les principes sont toujours les meˆmes” (Meillet 1912: 131). Greek is quoted in many textbooks as providing many examples of grammaticalization (the demonstrative becoming the article; the verb have becoming an auxiliary forming the perfect tense; the numeral one becoming an indefinite pronoun; the verb want becoming the future marker). A few scholars, notably Newmeyer (1998: 226–95) and, with more relevance to Greek, Joseph (2001), have argued against this idea, indicating that grammaticalization is little more than a summarizing label for a combination of long-known independent changes: an abstraction, a tautology, a reification with little explanatory power.22 The idea of unidirectionality, which is usually assumed by grammaticalization has another implication relevant to our analysis of the history of Greek prepositions. It is usually taken to presume that the development of languages has to be cyclical (cf. also Lundskær-Nielsen 1993: 187). This idea has a long history: the notion of linguistic renewal, at the core of the discourse of grammaticalization, was already current in German philological works of the nineteenth century (cf. Hopper and Traugott 1993: 20). To see an example closer to our main concern here, let us begin by considering case usage in Finnish. Finnish has developed a partitive case; this has, however, come to perform a number of “syntactic” functions, while its older concrete sense of motion-away-from has weakened. The original spatial (ablative) sense is still clear in certain constructions and in set forms (now regarded as adverbs) like kaukaa “from afar”. Phrases requiring an explicit concrete partitive meaning are now expressed, with an even clearer spatial metaphor (arguably, a clearer partitive sense) by the elative case: yksi heista¨ “one of them”. The Finnish elative case (like the ablative) is a later creation than the partitive; with its strong spatial sense, it has come to replace the partitive case once the partitive had come to express more abstract or grammatical meanings. In Romance linguistics we see a similar process. The partitive sense of genitive phrases like “few of us”, in Colloquial Latin came to be “renewed” by a construction with a preposition and the ablative: Classical Literary Latin Spoken Latin Modern Roman Italian

pauci nostrorum pauci de nostris pochi de’ nostri

(Caes. B. Gall. 1.15.2)

22 For more examples and a good account of the issues involved in the debate, see the various articles in Love (2001).

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We shall see a similar process in Greek, with the ancient ablative becoming what classical grammars call the genitive, and now being replaced by I. A parallel development can also be seen in the history of English, with the partitive genitive of Old English changing to of. The restoration of the original concrete sense of an adposition can go as far back as renewing its primaeval body-part meaning: in Melanesian Pidgin English (where many English simplex prepositions are turned into compounds, e.g. behind >bihain long), the etymology of the English “in front of ” (Latin *inþfronte “at the forehead of ”) is of course opaque, and a new compound preposition meaning “in front of ” has been created (Hall 1943: 33): fored long. In sum, there is an overwhelming tendency for the diachronic development of languages to go in one direction (Croft 1990: 230, Heine et. al. 1991b: 4, Hurford 2003: 52, Evans and Green 2006: 708) and to be mostly cyclical, although more (albeit rare) possible scenarios should be envisaged. The notion of a cline (of a unidirectional pull) has been questioned (cf Lass 1997: 292ff., Lehmann 1995: 16, Newmeyer 1998: 223–78). In principle, losses of linguistic elements can be either definitive or not— and if not, they may entail either reversal of the change, or replacement with an analogous element. Thus there can be linguistic loss (Figure 2.5). LINGUISTIC LOSS

cyclical linear

pendular: original restored recursive: original replaced final: permanent loss

FIGURE 2.5 Source: Adapted from Bichakjian (1990: 37ff.).

Let us note also that the idea of constant renewal implies a diachronically steady degree of complexity, and this has also been questioned. Comrie (1992: 194–5) says that some languages are less complex, and talks of an “historical accumulation of linguistic complexity”, concluding (ibid.: 209) that, in inflectional languages, fusional morphology once did not exist. Heine and Kuteva (2002: 390–4) suggest that languages, in a distant past, may have been intrinsically different from those now attested; they would have started with only concrete lexical items before developing abstract morphosyntactic forms, and they would have had a primaeval stage with no inflection; indeed (Hurford 2003: 53) with no prepositions, no metaphor, no polysemy, no abstract nouns.

2.14 Does diachrony corroborate the localistic hypothesis? The anecdotal examples of “localistic” diachronic developments that we have seen earlier in this chapter have some weight by virtue of their number—one of


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the reasons why we have decided to gather and list here several of them, even if they are not all immediately related to prepositional usage or to Greek. But in order to assess more conclusively to what extent the localistic interpretation of prepositions is diachronically justified, we would need to find the theory vindicated or belied somewhere systematically. The problem is that we would need to be able to observe the very birth of the prepositional system of a language, so as to check the extent—if any—of spatial and non-spatial use. The philologists who instinctively supported a localistic hypothesis, knew that Classical languages are not documented far enough back in time to give an adequate picture of the birth of a prepositional system. This is true even of Greek, which is attested from about 1200 BC. What reconstructions of prehistoric stages tell us is hazy, fragmentary, and questionable. Those against a localistic interpretation claimed this (not altogether wrongly) as the winning factor: Iflge den historiske Thesis skal altsaa en Præpositions oprindelige eller ældste Betydning være rumlig. Men hvad skal der her forstaas ved oprindelig? Maaske det ældste Trin vi kan naa ved vore Tilbageslutninger? Men disse maa ndvendigvis blive desto usikrere jo længere vi sger tilbage. According to the historical thesis, a preposition’s original or oldest meaning should therefore be spatial. But what are we to take “original” to mean? Perhaps the oldest stage we can reach with our reconstructions? But these must inevitably get more uncertain the further back we search. (Brndal 1940: 23)

Vandeloise starts from a similar premise, but takes it in a different and more promising direction: Most words describing space are considered highly polysemic. . . . However, from a diachronic point of view, one may surmise that in the history of language, as well as in the acquisition, the birth of each word begins with a single connection between its form and one corresponding meaning. . . . This ideal state might be found through etymology, but the origins of language are too uncertain to provide much evidence. (Vandeloise 2006: 151)

And at this point he adds in a footnote: “the example of neologisms extending their first meaning to different uses might be more revealing” (ibid.). This is precisely what we find in Greek. Greek is an exceptional and invaluable case, as it provides data across 3200 years, two millennia of which are (with few gaps) documented; the fascinating history of Greek prepositions, if finally observed in its whole span, proves to be long enough to show not the birth of the Ancient Greek prepositional system but its death and renewal, and has therefore—besides its intrinsic philological interest— many things to reveal.

3 On the development of prepositions "ªŒÅ ªaæ e æH KÅ Æ ŒÆŁ’ ŒÆ çŁªª º ŁÆØ Because it is necessary, first of all, for the meaning of each word to be looked at (Epicurus Ep. Hdt. 2.38)

3.1 Cases from adpositions We noted that cases and adpositions perform similar functions (pp. 6–15); but besides having synchronic affinities, they are also historically related: cases develop from postpositions. In Estonian we can see this process in fieri. Consider the use of the Estonian comitative case. On the one hand, the comitative ending can appear used in this way (hyphenation added): (3.1)

la¨ken ‘I walk

isa-ga ja ema-ga dad-with and mum-with’

but this can also appear as: (3.2) la¨ken isa ja ema-ga ‘I walk dad and mum-with’ where the case ending seems to “govern” synchronically more than one noun, the way postpositions and prepositions do. This surely must be interpreted as: (3.3) la¨ken

[isa ja ema]ga

and can be taken as evidence of the origin of the case form as a postposition. The Estonian suffix -ga is cognate to the Finnish and Karelian postposition kannsa (Oinas 1961: 12ff.), which probably derived from an inessive case form, related to the noun kansa “folk”. The Estonian comitative is one of the many Estonian cases (cf. p. 8) that is added to a genitive base; so -ga is what remains of a postposition that governed the genitive.

On the development of prepositions

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Case forms tend to develop from postpositions because in many languages there are no other elements of the NP that come in between the noun and the postposition: all determiners and modifiers precede the noun. There does not appear to exist any language in which the reverse occurs—that is, in which other elements cannot occur between preposition and noun, and all always follow them. This explains the rarity of preposed case prefixes (p. 3, note 1). There are other Estonian cases, such as the essive and the translative, which can be suffixed to a noun but not to its attributive adjectives. The adjective appears in the genitive (data from Haman 1962: 142). If we bear in mind that the Estonian translative and essive case suffixes are attached onto a genitive base of the noun, their (ex-)postpositional nature becomes obvious: (3.4) Me peame ootama ja¨rgmise suveni ‘we must wait (till) next[GEN] summer[[GEN]TRANSL]’ (3.5)

Ta tuli Ameerikast tagasi rikka mehena ‘he returned from America (a) rich[GEN] man[[GEN]ESSIVE]’

According to Kilby (1981: 114), Karelian and Vepsian (other Balto-Fennic languages) have also grammaticalized old postpositions into case markers, which still do not show agreement of the attributive adjective. Amongst IndoEuropean languages, a language that exhibits the same phenomenon of gruppenflexion is Tocharian (Krause and Thomas 1960: 1: 91ff.). In Tocharian, prepositions are a receding option, older and fewer than postpositions (Penney 1989: 56), and there are two types of case inflections: primary (for nominative, genitive, and oblique), and secondary (innovative ones, built on the oblique stem). That the latter group is a comparatively recent grammaticalization of postpositions is made obvious both by their invariability as to number, and by their use only after the last of a sequence of nouns: (3.6) koklem ˙

NOUN OBL

onkolmamnpa ˙ ˙

NOUN OBL COMIT

‘with chariots (and) elephants’ Oscan attests the development of a case ending from the Indo-European form *en (a reflex of which can be found in most Indo-European languages, including Greek K, Latin in, and English in). In Latin, it existed as a preposition, placed before the inflected noun and adjective—for example: Classical Latin

in horto cereali

‘in the garden of Ceres’

In Oscan the adposition had been used postpositionally, and coalesced with the case ending and formed a new ending (Kahr 1976: 117):

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Background to Greek prepositions hu´rtıń kerrıíıń

Oscan

where the ending -ıń (¼e¯n), on both nouns, is from the locative case -ej and the postposition en. A postposition in the process of becoming a case ending can also be seen today in Turkish, although standard descriptions of Turkish (including Lewis 2000: 21, 33, 84) do not list it as a case—perhaps in deference to the tradition, or to the model of the Latin and Greek case inventories. All Turkish grammars note that the comitative postposition ile, in every register, can also be suffixed (as -le), but do not give it the status of a case. It is true that it does not carry the stress that case forms usually have, but it does conform to the requirements of vowel harmony of the word it is attached to (-le/-la): ‘by train’ ‘by plane’

tren ile uçak ile

> tren-le > uçak-la

and vowel harmony is usually quoted as a distinguishing trait between inflections and postpositions (Korponay 1986a: 102). In standard Turkish, most pronouns (unlike nouns), when governed by the postposition ile, or suffixed with -le, appear in the genitive (hyphenation added): (3.7) Standard a sen-in ile > sen-in-le ‘with you’ 2PN.-GEN with b on-un ile > on-un-la ‘with him/her’ 3PN.-GEN with In colloquial Turkish, however, -le/-la is applied onto pronouns omitting the genitive suffix, which shows -le/-la becoming a case suffix in its own right: (3.8) Colloquial a sen-le ‘with you’ b on-la ‘with him/her’ The key factor in the history of case forms—besides their analogical spread within a language—is therefore their grammaticalization, “le passage d’un mot autonome au roˆle d’e´le´ment grammatical” (Meillet 1912: 131). The tendency, discussed earlier (p. 15), for adpositions to express local meanings and for cases to express grammatical ones perhaps finds its explanation here: adpositions are more recently created than cases (including in Greek); their meaning reflects their lower degree of grammaticalization, and suggests that the earliest meanings are spatial, with the youngest set of K markers in a language


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expressing local meanings, while older elements such as inflections have developed abstract meanings.

3.2 Sources for prepositions We saw that case forms derive from adpositions; but where do adpositions come from? An answer to this question might also help us identify the original meaning of adpositions. The diachronic processes leading to the formation of new adpositions have only recently started to attract the attention of scholars: Fries (1991: 56) complained that they had “scarcely been investigated”. Adpositions come from various sources, but not with equal frequency. For instance, verbs are a major sources of prepositional forms, although this fact receives limited coverage because it is seldom instantiated in western languages. Svorou (1994: 207) indicates two routes leading from verbs to local adpositions: co-verbs and participles. The latter route is familiar from Indo-European languages; co-verbs are something attested in Thai, where prepositions come mainly from verbs (Blake 1994: 163ff.): caàk maa

‘to leave’ ‘to come’

but, after verb of motion, ‘from’ but, after verb of motion, ‘to’

And not only in Thai; the prepositions of both classical and modern Chinese are said to be verbal in origin (Norman 1988: 92), and indeed still to occur as verbs as well. Chinese grammars even disagree as to whether the co-verbs are synchronically prepositions that happen to derive historically from verbs or verbs that may also act as prepositions (see Cartier 1970: 91); the distinction between prepositions and verbs in Chinese is a complex issue extensively debated in Chinese studies (Hage`ge 1975: 45–59), and Chinese also has prepositions without corresponding verbs. Examples of Chinese co-verbs (see Hopper and Traugott 1993: 26, Blake 1994: 166) include: ba˘ ge˘i zaì daò ge¯n yo`ng

‘to grasp’ ‘to give’ ‘to be near’ ‘to arrive’ ‘to follow’ ‘to use’

also used as ACCUSATIVE marker also used as DATIVE/BENEFACTIVE marker also used as LOCATIVE marker also used as ALLATIVE marker also used as COMITATIVE marker also used as INSTRUMENTAL marker

Thus all sorts of meanings can be expressed by a verb used as a preposition: anything from spatial position (not just direction, cf. Svorou 1994: 111)

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to abstract or even grammatical meanings. Korean too has verbal prepositions of the same kind (Kahr 1975: 39): teˆbireˆ putheˆ wihaja

‘with’ ‘from’ ‘for(purpose)’

< teˆbıˆlda < putta < wihada

‘to embrace’ ‘to pass by’ ‘to benefit’

Co-verbs are also found in Niger-Congo languages such as Yoruba, Igbo, and Ewe, as well as in Vietnamese; in Fijian too, there are prepositions derived from transitive verbs (Geraghty 1976: 512); To’aba’ita (an Austronesian language spoken on the southeastern Solomon island of Malaita) has many prepositions that comparative work indicates as being derived from verbs (Lichtenberk 1991: 47–60): fasi bii

‘(away) from’ ‘(together)with’

—cf. cognate Kwara’ae verb fa’asi ‘to leave’ —cf. cognate Arosi verb bei ‘to be an ally’

Indeed, in To’aba’ita these prepositions still index their complements the way transitive verbs index their object. To’aba’ita also has noun-like prepositions, which index their complement by the same markers used as genitival suffixes, and even verb-like prepositions that have come to be used as noun-like prepositions, showing that the two origins became confused. Across the world, according to Blake (1994: 163), when it comes to sources for prepositions, verbal forms are “probably the most fruitful”. Svorou (1994: 70), on the other hand, found that in her database—sizeable and quite wideranging—nouns were by far the most common source of “spatial grams”. In European languages, the most productive verbal forms for prepositions have been participles: Swedish French Spanish Italian German Dutch Portuguese Latin

anga˚ende durant mediante radente betreffend niettegenstaande exceto trans

‘concerning’ ‘during’ ‘through’ ‘along’ ‘regarding’ ‘despite’ ‘except’ ‘across’

English is no exception, with regarding, considering, including, barring, and counting, among others. English has also participial constructions in which the original subject has come to be seen as the object of a “prepositional” participle, such as pending, notwithstanding, or during. Ko¨nig and Kortmann (1991: 116, see also Svenonius 2004: 7) distinguish:

On the development of prepositions considering the difficulties, he decided against it considering the difficulties, he performed adequately

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(participle) (preposition)

When such participles become prepositions, the range of places within the sentence where they may occur gets restricted. The external argument of the verb becomes the internal argument of the “preposition”: Latin [illa¯ vita¯] durante >

Italian durante [la vita]

‘during life’

The affinity between participles and prepositions (or adverbs) is clear semantically: (3.9)

a she opened the letter with a kitchen knife b she opened the letter using a kitchen knife

(3.10) a there was a reception following the performance b there was a reception after the performance In Turkish we find a few gerunds, such as that of kalmak “to remain”, used in postpositional fashion that shows how the transition occurs: (3.11)

gelme–sin-e u¨¸c gu¨n kal-a coming-his-to three day remain-ing ‘three days before his arrival’

In Greek, verbs have not been a fruitful source of prepositions. Prepositional use of participles was difficult for Classical Greek participles because they were inflected—unlike Chinese verbal forms. When inflected languages (in which a verb normally receives marking for person, number, tense, or aspect) do use verbs as adpositions, they often stop adding onto them the markers that are customary for verbal forms. In Latin, a participle like trans was able to become a preposition once the verb *trare fell out of use; the form versus (a common past participle in Classical Latin, from verto “to turn”) became invariable in form in Romance (e.g. Italian verso “towards”). Another verbal mood that provides a few prepositions is the imperative (or subjunctive): English Italian

bar/save (¼without) come (¼with the beginning of) tranne ‘except’ (< trai-ne ‘remove therefrom’)

But prepositions in Indo-European languages come from all major lexical classes. So, adjectives are occasionally a source:

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English Spanish Italian

near salvo ‘except’ lungo ‘along’

and more are used colloquially—for example, the American adjacent (Kahr 1975: 41).1 Rarely, we find more complex sources, such as instances of univerbation (condensing a phrase into a single word). A clear example can be seen in late Classical and Modern Hebrew: MZ /Sl/ “of ” from Z þ M corresponding to MA YA

/?ÆSR ?l/ “which (is or belongs) to”. In English too, older prepositional phrases have univerbated into prepositions: Old English Old English Old English Middle English

on middan on (ge)mang be sidan in stede of

‘in middle-DAT’ ‘in (collective) multitude’ ‘by side-DAT’ ‘in place of ’

> amid > among > beside > instead of

Brndal (1928: 80) explicitly denies prepositional status to ex-adjectives, erstwhile prepositional phrases, and verbal derivatives like participles. But others took the opposite view: En geńe´ral, tout mot, de`s qu’il exprime une relation fonctionnelle entre deux unite´s de langue, tend a` perdre son sens propre, et sa valeur grammaticale originelle pour entrer dans l’espe`ce pre´positive. (Galichet 1947: 49)

Borrowing of adpositions also occurs. Latin, for instance, has borrowed a number of prepositions from Greek at different times (see Szantyr 1965: 227b, 254ff., Leumann 1977: 562): endo (Classical Latin) ana (Biblical Latin) in gyro (post-Classical Latin) cata (Biblical Latin and Romance)

from Classical Greek from Classical Greek I from post-Classical Greek ªæø fi from Classical Greek ŒÆ

Turkish has very many postpositions from Arabic, including kadar “as far as”, rag˘men “despite”, nazaran “in view of ”, dair “regarding”, itibaren “with effect from”, evvel “before”. Even Spanish has borrowed from Arabic, adopting hatta ˙˙ as hasta “until”. Some English prepositions too are loans: till, from 1 That nouns and verbs should serve more commonly than adjectives as sources for the development of new prepositions also makes sense in terms of the feature-based classification of word classes that was developed in generative grammar. In those terms, Nouns, Verbs, Prepositions, and Adjectives are seen in terms of the two features [N] and [V]: P ¼ –N–V; N ¼ þN–V; V¼ –N þ V; ADJ ¼ þN þV. So Nouns and Verbs are, so to speak, only “one feature away” from prepositions, whereas Adjectives need to change two features to become Prepositions—possible but less likely.


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Scandinavian; vis-a`-vis, a` la, and sans from French; and many from Latin: circa, pace, per, pro, qua, versus, cum.

3.3 Nouns as a source for adpositions The suggestion that nouns and prepositions should be classified synchronically as the same syntactic category has (with good reason) almost never appeared in the literature – a notable exception being Fillmore (1969: 14ff.). The categories N and P synchronically cannot be collapsed into one because they are distributionally different. Nouns do, however, have much in common with prepositions. A clear instance of this are the phrasal prepositions like in front of, which are described by some (e.g. DeLancey 2005: 190) as the borderline between adpositions and nouns. Urdu postpositions show the link between the two morphologically; nouns are in the oblique case when governed by a postposition: ‘goat’

‘from (the) goat’ ‘of (the) goat’

b#kra¯ # b#kre b#kre se b#kre ke/ka/ki

direct case oblique case, for instance:

The possessive postposition (the last example) appears in multiple forms, because it changes form according to the gender, number, and case of the noun that follows it: b#kre ka kamra¯ [noun in þ postpos. of þ noun] oblique

¼ the room of the goat

b#kre ke ka¯n ¼ the ears of the goat [noun in þ postpos. of þ noun] oblique This is noteworthy here because Urdu also has a large class of secondary postpositions, which seem to be constructed in the same way as nouns: they follow the “of ” postposition that comes after the noun in the oblique: b#kre ke sa¯th [oblique þ postpos. of þ secondary postpos. with] b#kre kıˆ taraf [oblique þ postpos. of þ secondary postpos. towards]

¼ with the goat ¼ towards the goat

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As the change in form of the possessive postposition (ka/ke/ki) suggests, the ‘secondary postpositions’ are nouns. In fact, taraf is originally an Arabic noun /taraf/ meaning “side, part, direction”. The origin of these forms in ˙ Urdu is classified as locative by Grahame Bailey et al. (1956: 88): if this is correct, the last example “towards the goat” should be glossed literally as: (3.12) b#kr-e kıˆ NOUN-OBL PREP goatof

taraf NOUN-LOC direction-in

The origin of this construction becomes clear if we read the gloss above from right to left: ‘in-[the]-direction-of þ (obl)NOUN’. Note, again, how “secondary postpositions” indicate more precise spatial relations than the plain case. In Estonian, postpositions are often clearly nouns, and the meaning of a postpositional phrase is often synonymous with that of an inflected form of the noun: the postposition is a more recent device, expressing more clearly or emphatically a meaning also carried by inflection alone (all hyphenation is added): katus (noun) ‘roof ’ pea (noun) ‘head’

-e (genitive suffix) -le (allative suffix) -lt (ablative suffix)

These can combine thus: (3.13)

katus-e pea-le NOUN-GEN NOUN-ALLAT roof-OF head-TO ‘onto the roof ’

(3.14) katus-e pea-lt NOUN-GEN NOUN-ABLAT roof-OF head-FROM ‘from the roof ’ The same concepts can also be expressed by case suffixation alone: katuse-le katuse-lt

‘onto the roof’ ‘from the roof ’

Basque postpositions too are transparently inflected nouns (Saltarelli 1988: 251); Akkadian prepositions too come from nouns (especially


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body parts) inflected for case or simply in the construct state (Lancellotti 1962: 159ff.): from s:e¯r ‘shoulders/back’ > ina s:e¯r ‘on’ According to Gesenius et al. (1910: 297) all Hebrew prepositions are derived from nouns. Similarly, Coptic monolectic prepositions are ex-nouns; and Coptic “compound” prepositions are [prepositionþnoun] sequences, in which the noun is usually a part of the body (hand, heart, head, face, back, bosom, foot). Their use is both spatial and non-spatial. Again, the compound prepositions were introduced into the language “in order to accent” the meaning of a simplex preposition (Houghton 1959: 211). In Persian (Lambton 1966: 110ff.) we find, broadly speaking, two sets of prepositions. There is one set of (mainly) short, older forms, with no transparent nominal referent; and a second set made of nouns and adverbs (¼ exnouns), that are now used as prepositions. Prepositions of the second type have the eza¯fe—a suffix marking an object as “possessed” (as opposed to the genitive, that does not mark the possessum but the possessor)—which is typical of nominal morphology. Latin prepositions too are said to be mostly case forms of nouns (Szantyr 1965: 214). The cases are mainly accusative and ablative. The prepositions of Arabic (Haywood and Nahmad 1965: 421)—and other Semitic languages (Lipin´ski 1997: 460ff.)—are also often nouns, usually in the accusative. Their nominal origin is further shown by the fact that they even have diminutives (Wright 1896: I: 167). Most Finnish adpositions are transparently, synchronically, inflected nouns, and they take the personal endings characteristic of nominal inflection: (3.15) auto – n pera¨ – ssa¨ NOUN–GEN NOUN–INESSIVE car–OF rear–IN/AT ‘behind the car’ (3.16) pera¨ – ssa¨ – mme NOUN–INESSIVE–1 PL.POSS rear–IN/AT – our ‘behind us’ And, as we saw earlier (pp. 86–8), postpostions can then become cases: few of the (notoriously numerous) Finnish cases are from Proto-Finnic, and many can be identified as postpositions (Oinas 1961: 8ff.) by looking either at earlier stages of the language or at sister languages.

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Turkish postpositions are also transparently nominal in origin. The noun is often still in use as such. For instance, o¨n “front”, is used adpositionally thus: (3.17)

araba – nın NOUN–GEN

o¨n – un – de NOUN-3 SG.POSS–LOC

car–OF front-OF IT–AT ‘in-front-of the car’ (this being the only possible way to say ‘in front of ’) In Tajik (where there are no case inflections) many prepositions are morphologically identical to nouns, and receive the same izafet suffix (Rastorgueva 1963): darun darun-i xona

‘interior’ ‘in [the] house’

although Tajik also has monosyllabic prepositions without identifiable nominal origin, such as dar (at) or ba (to). For some African languages, the overall distinction between nouns and adpositions is at times controversial (Heine 1989: 79): the same Hausa words are classified as prepositions in some grammars and as nouns in others. Robert (2005: 125) says that the word ginnaaw in Wolof is synchronically “transcategorial”, as it is a noun for a body part (“back”), a preposition (“behind; after; except”), and a subordinating conjunction (“given that”). Miller (1985: 85) cites expressions such as middle next week as example of nouns currently becoming prepositions, and he labels them “telegraphese”. They are, indeed, the rule in some English dialects: in Cambridgeshire, of is omitted after nouns indicating areas of objects, such as top, end, side, middle (Ojanen 1985: 183). Ancient Greek prepositions are often attested with an ending believed to be a nominal case marker: K /K æ /æ ŒÆ /ŒÆÆ æ

‘in’ ‘towards’ ‘down’ ‘around’

There are also prepositions occurring with local suffixes usually found on place names and nouns denoting location; one example is the ablative suffix -Ł: Nouns:

YŒŁ I ºØŁ PæÆŁ

‘from home’ ‘from Troy’ ‘from the sky’

< YŒ < ”ºØ < PæÆ

‘home’ ‘Troy’ ‘sky’

On the development of prepositions Prepositions:

æ Ł oæŁ Ł

‘from near’ ‘from above’ ‘from inside’

< æ < æ < K

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‘towards’ ‘up’ ‘in’

Adverbs are often described as invariable, but in many languages they show variable case endings (as nouns do): Turkish

bura-ya bura-da bura-dan

base þ dative suffix base þ locative suffix base þ ablative suffix

¼ to here (hither) ¼ here ¼ from here (hence)

In Finnish, pre- and postpositions mainly take a partitive or a genitive that is regarded as adnominal. Most inflected nouns employed as prepositions are associated with a case-inflected noun or with another adposition that has partitive, ablative, or possessive meaning. In Greek we can see this construction developing time and again in the history of the language: an inflected noun comes to be used as a preposition, and the dependent noun in a genitive case comes to be seen as governed by it; later, the Greek partitive genitive is replaced by a preposition: Classical Late/Koine´ Today

æ-d F Œı ŒŒº-ø fi F Œı ªæ-ø fi Ie e ŒB

‘around the garden’ ‘around the garden’ ‘around the garden’

When an adposition starts its life as a noun, the case inflection on the nouns which it precedes or follows is not a marker of their “governee” status, but has full independent semantic value. Once a noun becomes an adposition, the dependent noun becomes a governed adnominal complement, and the (mostly genitive) case on it becomes a marker of government. We saw that nouns used in adpositional fashion can be found in many unrelated languages. Linguists who opposed the idea of prepositions having “full” meaning, like Brndal, claimed that nouns so used were not prepositions: Af de talrige Ord, der i Grammatikerne opfres som Præpositioner, bærer mange ikke med Rette dette Navn: at f. Ex. nominale eller verbale Udtryk analogt med Præpositioner styrer en Casus, er ikke nok til at gre dem til Præpositioner. Of the numerous words which are listed in the Grammars as prepositions, many carry that name with no right: the fact that, for example, nominal or verbal expressions govern a case the way prepositions do is not enough to make them prepositions. (Brndal 1928: 80)

Brndal (1928: 79), in fact, specified that the adpositions (as we would see them) of Basque, Turkish, or Ugro-Finnic languages do not belong with prepositions.

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How does a noun become an adposition? The change must be very gradual: From the point of view of change, forms do not shift abruptly from one category to another, but go through a series of gradual transitions, transitions that tend to be similar in type across languages. (Hopper and Traugott 1993: 6)

First, the noun must take on adverbial functions; according to Kuryłowicz (1949: 138), the primary function of nouns inflected for a case that expresses a “concrete” meaning (locative, ablative, etc.) is adverbial, although they are distinguished from adverbs by the very fact that their case inflection may also have a secondary, purely syntactical function: ‘comme classe syntaxique les cas concrets, occupant une place interme´diaire entre le cas grammatical et les adverbes’ (Kuryłowicz 1949: 143). The link between inflected nouns and adverbs is clear in Ancient Greek: all cases, including the rare or obsolete ones, are also used as adverbs (Palmer 1980: 283): Nominative Accusative Genitive Dative Ablative Instrumental Locative

PŁ ŒÅ æØŒ ŒØfiB ø ºŁæÆ æı Ø

‘immediately’ ‘rightly’ ‘freely’ (Homeric) ‘in common’ ‘outside’ ‘stealthily’ ‘last year’

Now let us see how the inflection of a noun can turn it into an adverb: Swedish

ett hem hem hemma hemifra˚n

¼ ‘a home’ ¼ ‘homewards’ ¼ ‘at home’ ¼ ‘away from home’

These Swedish adverbs are not used as prepositions, but it is not hard to envisage a development in that direction. We find it in Romance languages: Late Latin # Old Italian/French

# French

casa casa¯

‘home’ ‘at home’

casa þ oblique case (unmarked case also used as genitive)

‘at home (of)’

chez

‘at the home of ’ (cf. also Harrison and Ashby 2003).


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In Swedish too, the preposition hos (the semantic equivalent of French chez) is related to the noun hus “house”. Some modern English grammars (e.g. Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 614) classify the English word home as an (obligatorily intransitive) preposition. An even more complete diachronic picture, with nouns developing into adpositions and then into case endings, can be gleaned from Hungarian. Let us start by noting that Hungarian has a triad of case suffixes that indicate position-at, motion-to, and motion-from a location in the proximity of the referent object: ending ending ending

-na´l -hoz -to˝l

‘by’ ‘to by’ ‘from by’

Hungarian, however, has also developed adpositional uses of the word mell “breast/chest” (Ka´roly 1972: 107). We do not need to conjecture that mell is a noun: it is still in current use as such. Its inflected forms have come to be employed as postpositions, but the postpositions derived from it are synchronically perceived as unrelated to it, probably because their case endings are now obsolete: postposition postposition postposition

mellett melle´ mello˝l

old locative of the noun mell > ‘by’ old lative of the noun mell > ‘to by’ old ablative of the noun mell > ‘from by’

Inflected nouns that come to be used as adpositions often preserve case forms otherwise disused. This also happened in Greek: I ç preserves the old instrumental (Indo-European -*bhi) and K preserves the old ablative ending (cf. also Latin intus). The use of these Hungarian adpositions is often synonymous with that of the (productive) case endings further above. But when the postposition is used, no case marking on the noun is required. So the noun fa “tree” can be used like this: (3.18)

a a kocsi a fańa´l a´ll the car the tree-by stands b a kocsi a fa mellett a´ll the car the tree chest-by stands

So we can clearly see an adposition, mellet (originating from the form mell) is used with the noun fa, instead of a case ending -na´l. Other Hungarian postpositions are often transparently and synchronically nouns: Hungarian has, according to Korponay (1986b: 9), a high quota of

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postpositions with clear nominal origin: 78.1 per cent—the development was favoured by the syntax, for in Proto-FinnoUgric the genitive preceded the noun and was uninflected. Hungarian attests one more thing. The word be´l “entrails, intestines” (synchronically used and inflected as a noun) is also used as a case suffix (Oinas 1961: 9, Kahr 1976: 119ff.): -bo˝l/bo´l -ba/be -ban/ben

elative illative inessive

ha´z ‘house’ >

ha´zbo´l ha´zba ha´zban

‘from [the] house’ ‘into [the] house’ ‘in [the] house’

The kind of evolution seen here matches the “cline” posited by Hopper and Traugott: lexical noun > relational phrase > adverb > adposition > case affix from a historical perspective, a cline is a natural pathway along which forms evolve . . . synchronically, a cline can be thought of as a “continuum” . . . The precise cluster point on the cline (i.e. the label preposition, affix, etc.) are to a certain extent arbitrary. (Hopper and Traugott 1993: 6–7)2

Studies exploring the origin of certain prepositions, such as Lichtenberk’s (1991: 60) work on Austronesian languages, stress the gradualness of changes in grammatical category status. The boundaries between categories are not only historically shifting: they are also synchronically somewhat blurred. In fact, they would need to be diachronically immutable, in order to be always synchronically clear. Heine (1989: 112) describes the grammaticalization of nouns into adpositions as an ongoing chain which “eludes the usual distinction between diachrony and synchrony” and is, in his view, panchronic. Studying grammaticalization we can see that, by focusing only on synchrony, and discarding diachrony as an explanatory factor, one misses out on important insights. A synchronic view usually presupposes membership of single and distinct grammatical categories, and grammaticalization casts doubts on this. Sapir had pointed out that

We noted earlier (pp. 83–4) that grammaticalization from full lexical items to grammatical morphemes is said to be cyclical—a reiterated renewal of expressions, “ainsi sans fin” as Meillet (1912: 140) put it. 2


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our conventional classification of words into parts of speech is only a vague, wavering approximation . . . they not merely grade into each other but are to an astonishing degree actually convertible into each other. (Sapir 1921: 117–18)

The importance of grammaticalization lies precisely in that it shows “the interdependence of langue and parole, of the categorial and less categorial, of the fixed and less fixed in language”. (Traugott and Heine 1991: i: 1)

3.4 Types of nouns that become adpositions A study carried out by Svorou (1986: 523) on the type of nouns from which adpositions develop reported that three major classes of nouns can turn into expressions of spatial relations: body parts, environmental parts, and object parts. Let us find some examples. 3.4.1 Parts of the body The largest class comprises parts of the (usually human) body: face, stomach, etc. No languages show this most clearly—and charmingly—than languages with pictorial scripts. In Egyptian we find (cf. Gardiner 1927: 130): tp

‘upon’ originally the word for ‘head’

The word for ‘head’ used as an adposition meaning “on” is one of the most common noun-to-adposition metaphors. We saw its use in Finnic languages: Finnish Estonian

paä¨lla peale

‘on top of ’ ‘on top of ’

< paä¨ < pea

‘head’ ‘head’

Indo-European languages show similar developments: English Welsh Latin Persian

ahead of ar ben coram ‫ﺑﺮ ﺳﺮ‬ /bar sar[e]/

‘in front of ’ ‘on top of ’ ‘in front of ’ ‘on top of ’

< ‘head’ < pen ‘head’ (cf. Kahr 1975: 45) < or- ‘mouth’ (cf. Sihler 1995: 439) < ‫‘ ﺳﺭ‬head’ and ‫‘ ﺑﺮ‬breast’ /sar/ /bar/

Body-based prepositions are also common in Semitic languages: Akkadian

paˆn

‘before’

lit. ‘face (of)’

Hebrew

JQJSM /l einei/ JQUM /lifnei/

‘before’

lit. ‘to eyes (of)’

‘before’

lit. ‘to face (of)’

< paˆnu ‘face’ (Dhorme 1923: 66) < NJ Q JS ‘eyes’ /einajim/ < NJQt ‘face’ /pa:nim/

e

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Similarly, Slavic pod “under” comes from the root for “foot”, and English in front of is derived from the Latin noun frons, meaning “forehead”.3 All this shows how our perception and description of reality is based on our human experience (cf. pp. 54–6). A confirmation of this comes from the fact that adpositions indicating motion towards an object, for example, if developed from nouns denoting a part of the body, normally derive from a word for a face, chest, or eyes rather than back; this is obviously due to the fact that we mainly move forward (Svorou 1994: 208), as our organs of perception are turned in that direction. The semantic history of adpositions also reflects human perception of external beings, such as animals; in some pastoral societies—for instance in East Africa (Heine 1989: 90; cf. Allan 2001: 292)— the parts of the body from which adpositions are created are sometimes those of animals. In that case, the metaphors are as shown in Figure 3.1. “back” = “upon/above” “head” = “in front (of)” “buttock” = “behind”

FIGURE 3.1

Some examples of adpositional phrases modelled on the image of our interaction with animals’ bodies also survive in European languages: Italian

a cavallo di due culture

‘straddling [lit. on horse(back) of] two cultures’

Nonetheless, while there are many languages whose terms of spatial orientation are exclusively derived from words denoting parts of the human body, no language has been found which makes reference only to animals (Heine 1989). 3.4.2 Environmental terms Less frequently, words for enviromental entities are used: sky, earth, river, etc. These have received less attention, but they also occur in Indo-European 3 The non-spatial use of clearly body-based prepositional phrases has often, initially, incurred the wrath of purists. In French, the use of vis-a`-vis not referring to persons, although common since the seventeenth century, has been condemned by many—including Voltaire (see Robert and Rey 1985: IX: 765, Guilbert et al. 1978: 7: 6498).


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languages—appearing either as inflected nouns or inside prepositional constructions: Catalan

damunt davall

‘on’ ‘under’

< *deþabþmonte ‘mountain’ < *deþabþvalle ‘valley’ (Cremades 1994: 15) Lithuanian lauke ‘outside’ < loc. of laukas ‘field’ Swiss Italian in faccia a ‘opposite’ < PP of faccia ‘face’ Mid.Welsh yn llwrw ‘after(loc)’ < PP of llwrw ‘track’ y maes o ‘outside’ < PP of maes ‘field’ (Evans 1964: 218) Note that metaphorical meanings soon develop: Welsh y maes o started being used in phrases like (3.19) y maes o’e wassanaeth dylyedus ‘outside its proper functions’

(Evans 1964: 201)

The enviromental terms used to express spatial relations can also be man-made ones. We saw above the evolution of Latin casa “home” into French chez. In Persian (Lambton 1966: 14), the noun /dar/ “door” is also employed as an adposition meaning “in”. The Middle Welsh (Evans 1964: 188) preposition ar ddrws “in front of” also comes from drws “door” (ar ¼ upon). In Classical Greek too, the noun ŁæÆ “door” develops terms indicating spatial relations: concrete noun used literally: ‹

Å łæçØ huqg ´ ŁÆº Ø ‘as wide as the door of a high-roofed hall’ (Il. 24. 317) # adverb, literal spatial sense: YŒØ º ø S pº huqafe ´ ‘like a lion he lept out [of the door of] the house (Il. 24. 572) adverb, wider spatial sense: ºŒ . . . ‰ . . . NåŁf KŒ Ø huqafe ´ ‘dragged [him] like fish out of the sea’ (Il. 16. 408) # preposition, abstract sense: huqafe ´ H ø ‘outside the law’ (Eur.Bacch. 331) Thus we can see (besides the chain noun>adverb>preposition) how a concrete location term becomes a metaphor for general spatial relations, and eventually enters abstract usage.

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3.4.3 Object parts Another group of linguistic elements that are (albeit very rarely) the origin of adpositions are object portions, with no distinct physical contour: top, middle, centre, etc. They are termed axial parts by Svenonius (2006), who argues that they are a syntactic category separate from prepositions, and from nouns, from which, however, they derive. Nouns giving rise to this group might seem to be non-concrete. However, in a large study of the small minority of adpositions of African languages that seem purely conceptual, Heine (1989: 88) found that wherever and whenever sufficient historical data were obtainable, they turned out to derive from terms of the preceding two kinds (body parts, or enviromental terms). They are, therefore, ultimately of concrete original sense: Swahili chini ‘down < bottom’ < Proto-Bantu * cı´ ‘soil’ þ locative suffix -ni Expressions like Modern Greek ªæø fi “around; concerning” may not refer to a specific object the way adpositions derived from the words for body parts do, but do nonetheless come from words indicating the concrete shape (as we perceive it) of objects: Modern Greek ªæø fi (þ /I þ NP) ¼ ‘concerning’ < ‘around(spatially)’ < lit. ‘in circle’ — <noun ªæ ‘circle’ Middle Welsh yg kylch (Evans 1964: 216) ¼ ‘concerning’ < ‘around(spatially)’ < lit. ‘in circle’ — < noun kylch ‘circle’. Several linguists insist that even in the most familiar languages (say, French) we can find adpositions with no spatial/concrete reference, like sans “without”—Brndal’s (1940: 25) own example. They maintain that the postulation of a primary spatial meaning for prepositions is flawed because those prepositions have no spatial sense and cannot be interpreted the same way as those that have one. A number of linguists agree: Il n’est jamais venu a` l’esprit de personne de mettre sur le meˆme pied des pre´positions comme sans, selon et de, a`, en nobody has ever dreamt of putting prepositions like without or according-to on the same footing as of, at or in (Spang-Hanssen 1963: 13).

Although such words do not represent a tangible object, the fact remains that sans “without” does come from a spatial image. Its etymology is the Latin absentia¯, which literally indicates being physically away from a given place: ab-esse, as opposed to prae-esse. The English translation “without” is a preposition that also has the original sense of being outside (the perceptual


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field), just like the corresponding Romanian fa˘ra˘ “without” is originally the Latin foras “outside”, and the Hungarian ne´lku¨l “without” (Korponay 1986a: 106–7.) is based on ku¨l, still found in ku¨lso˝ “outside”. The abessive case of languages like Finnish, originally indicating absence from a place, has also come to mean simply “without”. The equivalent Greek preposition åøæ “without” is related to the verb åøæÇø, “to separate” and, ultimately, to åHæ “space”. Its origin, therefore, is a spatial image of motion-away-from. In fact, Greek has also used the ablative preposition I in this privative sense (Amantos 1964: 205). In the Classical language we find: (3.20) ºª f `ŁÅÆı ÆPºÇ ŁÆØ Ipe H ‹ºø K fiB ºØ (Thuc. 6.64) ‘he said that the Athenians were encamped, without arms, in the city’ The very same development had occurred in Hebrew: the ablative sense of the preposition PO or O mi(n)/me “from” had also become “without” (Molin 1893: 55): (3.21)

J M PLM (Mic. 3.6) O NL M EM NR vO NLM ELHF PFG H ‘for you there shall be night without sight, and darkness without divination’

As a result, in the (Biblical) Greek translation, KŒ is also used for “without”: (3.22)

f E ÆØ K ›æ ø, ŒÆd ŒÆ E ÆØ KŒ ÆÆ

But there are parallel constructions in Byzantine Greek (Sofroniou 1989: 124): (3.23) › Ie O ø ‘the one without eyes(ight)’ [lit. ‘the from eyes’] Swedish idioms like vara ifra˚n fo¨rsta˚ndet, literally “be from understanding > without understanding”, have the same history (Molin 1893). Some adpositions therefore derive from nouns that indicate a concrete event or point in space conceptualized in abstract terms. Semitic languages provide a number of examples: /zula:t/ Hebrew ‘M FG ‘removal; departure’ > ‘except’ JMB /blij/ ‘destruction’ > ‘without’ also with JMB d /bi-vlij/ lit. PJ d /bajin/ Arabic

/bajn-a/

‘in destruction of’ ‘gap’

prepositions: > ‘without’ > PJB /bejn/ ‘between’

‘division[ACC]’

> ‘between’

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The history of Greek prepositions

(4.7)

[ þACC] a c F e åæ ‘after that time’

(Pl.Resp. 537b8)

In the light of this (we noted at pp. 20–5 that such prepositions can be described as discontinuous morphs), only a list of [Pþcase] syntagms is meaningful. The Classical Greek prepositional inventory is traditionally divided into two groups. The first comprises the prepositions that also occur as prefixes, for example: I çd Æ F I çØ ººø I çØ ºÆ I ç º I çØ ºø

preposition verb prefix noun prefix adjective prefix adverb prefix

‘on both sides of the river’ ‘throw around; embrace’ ‘attack on both sides; doubt’ ‘thrown around; ambiguous’ ‘in an equivocal manner’

The prepositions of this type are conventionally termed “proper” ones. Some of the commonest meanings of the “proper” prepositional syntagms are indicated in Table 4.1. The list, of course, is meant to be representative but not comprehensive.20 Most treatises, grammar books, primers, and dictionaries of Greek (to name just the ones that we most commonly use in Britain: Abbott and Mansfield 1897: 176; Goodwin 1894: 254; Smyth 1956: 372) describe the meanings of each Greek preposition starting from the spatial one, and list the other senses as in a chain. Many of the main Greek philologists (e.g. Schwyzer and Debrunner 1950: II: 421ff.; Wackernagel 1928: II: 165ff.; Ku¨hner and Gerth 1898: II: I: 449ff., 526ff.; Becker 1841: 212; Cooper 1998: II: 1134)21 stated explicitly that they assumed local meanings to be primary—although often without clarifying what they meant by this, and without citing evidence that would justify their choice.22 One nineteenth-century scholar, writing on Classical Greek prefixes, simply stated: “whatever theory we adopt of the origin of

20

The traditional and ubiquitous classification of Greek proper prepositions is in three subgroups, according to the number of cases (one, two, or three) that prepositions could be conjoined with. Such a grouping system is, in my view, rather unenlightening—pace Hjelmslev (1932: 14) who sees it as a natural division—and is here abandoned. 21 This has been done not only by Indo-European philologists, but by philologists of languages of other families. For example, Arabic; cf. Wright (1898: II: 129). 22 This is true also of many scholars who discussed prepositions as a general category, not only in reference to Greek (p. 50).

Part II The history of Greek prepositions

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4 Prepositions and cases in Ancient Greek K Æ Å B K ºØÅ F ı Æ H æŁ

ø

c ƒ æÆ B ººÅØŒB IÆØE NØÆæÅ æıÆ the study of the evolution of the prepositional system across the history of Greek demands special research (Setatos 1994: 886)

4.1 Greek in this study We noted at the outset that Greek has an exceptionally long documented history, like no other Indo-European language (Morpurgo Davies 1985: 75), which makes it the best choice for research in historical linguistics. Starting with this chapter, we shall survey prepositional use across the history of Greek by investigating the e´tat de langue in the Greek of different ages: Ancient,1 Hellenistic, Medieval, and Modern. On the basis of synchronic snapshots, we shall identify the main diachronic trends, bearing in mind that the history of Greek and, above all, the texts we have do not always constitute a single linear development. Prepositions are a particularly enlightening subject of study because, as philologists have long been pointing out (cf. e.g. Jannaris 1897: 365), if any particular section of Greek grammar is to be taken as a specimen to illustrate the historical evolution of the Greek language as a whole, no better representative could be selected than particles such as prepositions. Attic-Ionic Greek (Horrocks 1997a: 21ff.), the ‘Classical’ Greek par excellence,2 is our starting point. This is because it is the earliest Greek for which we 1

I employ the term “ancient” when referring to Greek usage before the Middle Ages including the pre-classical period (and therefore Homer), reserving the denomination of “Classical” for the Greek of Classical times (sixth–fourth centuries BC) and of the Classical varieties (Attic-Ionic dialects). 2 The definition as “Classical” is, of course, only the view of modern scholarship, and is due to the eminence and plentifulness of Attic-Ionic literature; to the Greeks of the time, Attic was a dialect on a

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have very extensive evidence, and because it is the variety from which later (attested) Greek developed—although in Ancient Greek there were several dialects, and no single standard form. In this chapter we will also examine some revealing peculiarities of the pre-Classical dialect of Homer.

4.2 The Classical Greek case system When studying Greek prepositions of pre-modern times, we need to look at cases too.3 This is not only because (as we saw earlier, pp. 6–15) there are intimate similarities between prepositions and cases in general, but because Ancient Greek prepositions were linked to nouns inflected for case.4 A Greek preposition often governed various cases with different semantic results. In order to assess Greek prepositional usage in antiquity, it is therefore necessary to have a basic idea of Greek case usage. Grammars of Classical Greek always distinguish five possible case forms in their paradigms (although the order in which they are listed varies), for example: Nominative Vocative Accusative Genitive Dative

e.g. e.g. e.g. e.g. e.g.

rŒ- rŒ- rŒ- YŒ-ı YŒ-ø fi

This classification (not without its didactic merits) overlooks two issues relevant to our study of prepositions. First, not all these five “case” endings qualify for the status of “case”. The vocative is not a case in any syntactic sense5 and semantically it has no spatial or adverbial meanings. The status of par with the others (see Morpurgo Davies 1987: 9ff.). We can overlook the slight differences between Attic and Ionic (cf. Meillet 1965: 229ff.) as inconsequential to our discussion. 3 More detailed expositions can be found in most comprehensive grammars (e.g. Ku¨hner and Gerth 1898: II: I: 290ff.; Schwyzer and Debrunner 1950: II: 52ff.) and in accounts of Greek syntax (e.g. Humbert 1960: 250ff.; Cooper 1998: I: 98–334). 4 The notion of case government, recognized in variant formulations by classical philology, structural linguistics, and Chomskyian generative grammar, is simply taken here in the broad sense of syntactic configurations in which “a word dictates the form of another” (Aronoff and Fudeman 2005: 156), so that “certain lexical heads have the power to determine the Case (and in some languages the case) of NPs that are their complements” (Horrocks 1987: 103). 5 Attempts have been made (e.g. Zdrenghea 1960: 800) to defend the classification of the vocative as a case by claiming that it marks the subject of imperatives—but this is marginal and questionable. The classification of the vocative as a case is purely structural: it is a word-final morph like case endings. Morphological marking of nouns used vocatively also occurs in languages without case inflections, like some Austronesian languages (Blake 1994: 9). Indian grammarians (Hjelmslev 1935: 4) did not list the vocative as a case, and the Greeks did not include the vocative in their inventory of cases until Dionysus Thrax (ca. 100 BC).

Prepositions in Ancient Greek

111

the nominative as a “case” like genitive, dative, and accusative is also questionable (cf. Bortone 2003: 325–7). On the other hand—as we shall see—forms of other case distinctions inherited from Indo-European were in use in Greek, albeit rarely and no longer productively (including after prepositions, unlike official “cases” such as nominative and vocative). In fact, we also find other endings that had local meaning but never received the label of “cases” at all. Secondly, the traditional classification of cases, being based on purely morpho-syntactic criteria,6 does not acknowledge that each case form had a multiplicity of semantic functions (cf. Bortone 2002: 70–5)—due either to internal semantic developments or to formal mergers of once separate case forms. The label traditionally given to a case form must be taken cum grano salis. Greek nouns and adjectives (and, to a large extent, pronouns) carry an overt or covert inflectional ending that marks them for number, gender, and case; since the first two categories appeared to traditional grammarians to be identifiable semantically, a similar approach was used for case too (Lyons 1968: 289). Each case was labelled with one of its semantic functions such as, for instance, ØŒ dativus for the case used for the recipient of verbs of giving. The Classical Greek dative, however, has also, inter alia, instrumental meaning; and this is not inherent in any dative case: Latin expresses instrumental meanings by means of its (socalled) ablative case, and Sanskrit has a separate case for it, indeed called instrumental.7 In the brief outline of case usage that follows, we shall take all these factors into account. The Greek nominative is described as the case of the subject and its predicates (cf. Ku¨hner and Gerth 1898: II: I: 31ff.) and it therefore has both essive and translative sense, although it is often said not to be a case at all, and it is used metalinguistically as the naming case. Its use is extremely frequent but its range of functions limited. It plays no role in prepositional phrases— and therefore a very limited one in this study. Nonetheless, let us note that there are reasons for speculating that even the meaning of the nominative may have been spatial in origin (Bortone 2003: 328–30).

6 Touratier (1994: 256) had a point when he argued that we can talk of the Greek case “system” only if by “system” we mean a morphological ensemble; individual case forms, however, are identified by function, not by form: e.g. “genitive” in ˜Ø- and Ł-oF: “rien de plus trouble que l’ensemble incohe´rent des formes casuelles” (Meillet 1948: 157). More on the morphology of Greek cases can be found in the classic account by Chantraine (1961: 35ff.). On the origin of the forms, see Rix (1992: 115ff.) or Szemereńyi (1990: 166ff.). 7 Traditional accounts are often conservative not only in the labels they give to case forms, but even in their claims as to what cases a language has. They may follow diachronically-based assumptions on how a language ought to be rather than seeking to establish what distinctions are actually made synchronically; cf. Comrie (1986: 86ff.) on Russian and Latvian.

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The Greek accusative, in Classical times, was already the most common case (Delaunois 1988: 37). Besides the syntactic function of marking direct objects and elements coreferential to it, the accusative had other meanings (Smyth 1956: 357ff.): spatial extension: ¼ªØ . . . a . . . › (Xen.Cyr. 1.6.43) “lead over narrow streets”;8 temporal extension: Ø æÆ (Xen.An. 1.2.6) “he remained for seven days”; limitation: e Œıº IºªE (Pl.Resp. 462d) “hurts in his finger”; quantity or mode: æ Ø “in some way”; many forms classified as adverbs are originally nouns in the accusative: ŒÅ “justly”, “a bit”— as in Latin (Hewson and Bubenik 2006: 46), e.g. statim “steadily, on the spot”, passim “here and there”. The Greek genitive case had a vast range of meanings. To understand its (Classical) synchronic spatial senses, it helps to bear in mind that, historically, the Classical Greek “genitive” (like the Slavonic one) continues two different Indo-European cases: the genitive and the ablative (cf. Schwyzer and Debrunner 1939: I: 546).9 In the so-called “genitive proper” the sense is partitive10 (Chantraine 1948: I: 58; Luraghi 1996: 39). This expresses (Humbert 1960: 300) spatial limitation—the singling out of a portion of the referent—as opposed to the spatial extension and total affectedness indicated by the accusative case: (4.1) B b IøÆ ŒÆd ¼ººŁØ ººÆåF ÆN åæe Ø ÆØ (Pl.Symp. 182b) ‘in Ionia and elsewhere in many places it is considered opprobrious’ The genitive as a continuation of the disused ablative is also discernible: (4.2)

ªaæ "ØŒc æe Œ ÆØ ººe B ¸ ı (Hdt. 6.139) ‘Attica, south(wards), lies a long (distance) from Lemnos’

Other meanings traditionally attributed to the genitive include (Smyth 1956: 314ff.): 8 Old grammarians denied altogether the existence of a directional accusative as such, postulating the ellipsis of a preposition. According to Sanctius Brocensis (1587: 209), those who see any difference between eo Romam and eo ad Romam “absurdius delirant”. 9 The causes of case syncretism in Greek have been variously interpreted and it has been argued that different dialects syncretized case differently. The decipherment of Mycenaean has complicated rather than clarified the issue; for a summary of the problems see Morpurgo Davies (1985: 98ff.) and Hajnal (1995). 10 Some languages (e.g. Finnish) have a partitive case distinct from the genitive and the ablative— but the Finnish partitive case was originally an ablative (see Hakulinen 1961: 70).


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possession: c NŒÆ c ø (Lys. 3.32) “Simon’s house”; reference: ç . . . H . . . ¯ƒºø (Thuc. 3.54) “fear about the Eilotes”; material: øæf ı (Xen.Hell. 4.4.12) “heaps of corn”; individuation: f IŒı H IŁæø (Dem. 27.68) “the unjust amongst men”; quality: KÆ . . . æı . . . ıåı (Hdt. 1.107) “being of quiet disposition”; comparison: ŁÆı Æ Øæ KŒı (Pl.Symp. 215b) “more wonderful than him”.

The Greek dative had an even wider range of meanings. This was partly due to the fact that it continued (semantically and morphologically)11 many IndoEuropean cases, having arisen from the merger of the old dative, locative, and instrumental12 (cf. Schwyzer and Debrunner 1939: I: 546; Ku¨hner and Gerth 1898: II: I: 404). Its main function was that of marking indirect objects: (4.3) ø Ø ÆPø fi Ð . . . Ø Ł ‘he gives him wages’13

(Xen.An. 1.1.10)

But the Classical dative also expressed (Smyth 1956: 337):14 motion towards:15 ŁÅæØ ºÇØ (Xen.Cyr. 1.4.7) “approach wild beasts”; location at (in poetic style): ÆØ Zæ Ø (Soph.O.T. 1451) “live on the mountains”; 11 The Ancient Greek endings of the “dative plural” of the second declension (-Ø and -Ø Ø) are those of the old instrumental and locative respectively. The Indo-European dative (Kuryłowicz 1964: 190) is an offshoot of the locative forms. Locative and allative senses came to coincide again in postClassical Greek, with N also being used instead of K. 12 In Sanskrit, instrumental, locative, and dative case forms are morphologically distinct. Classical Greek probably increased its use of prepositions to separate the senses. 13 The original sense of the dative may also explain why it is required by certain by verbs. The verb ÅŁH “succour, help”, for instance, which governs the dative, is thought (Chantraine 1999: 183) to be a compound of “a scream” and ŁH “to rush”, and to mean originally “to hasten towards (i.e. to the aid of) somebody screaming” (cf. English succour < Lat. sub-curro, like sub-venio, all by the same meaning). 14 We must note that the old instrumental case also had comitative sense—association and means are meanings that tend to co-exist in the same case or preposition (see p. 45), exemplifying the common “an instrument is a companion” metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 134). In Ancient Greek both those meanings of the old “instrumental” were incorporated into what we call “dative”. 15 Stefan´ski (1983: 139) argued that, as there is a link between genitive and ablative, so there is between dative and accusative. Their contrastive use with prepositions seems to suggest that dative emphasizes more the (contact with) the goal, while the accusative highlights the movement itself more. But there is clearly an allative sense in both, as Sanskrit also attests (Speijer 1886: 58). In their abstract use too, direct and indirect objects are often crosslinguistically interchangeable—see, e.g., accusative pronoun with English teach, Greek Ø Œø, Hebrew D OM, German lehren, but dative case/preposition with Italian insegnare, Turkish o¨g˘retmek, Russian yxbnm, Finnish opettaa. The northern Modern Greek accusative b ø corresponds to the Ancient dative d ø Ø “I give you”, and dative forms often become accusative ones; cf. German dative dem “to the”, ihm “to him” (vs. accusative den, ihn) developing in Yiddish as NSD /dem/ and NJA /im/ for both dative and accusative. The English accusative him (Lehmann 1995: 110) is also an ex-dative, replacing Old English hine. At a more theoretical level, the distinction between direct and indirect objects has been demolished by S.R. Anderson (1988).

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location in time: fiB b æÆÆfi [ æÆfi] (Xen.Hell. 1.14) “the day after”; means: Æºº ºŁØ (Lys. 3.8) “he hit me with stones”; interest: A Icæ ÆfiH E (Soph.Aj. 1366) “every man toils for himself”; possession: q Æ . . . fiH ˚æ ø fi ÆE (Hdt. 1.34) “Croesus had two sons”; association: qºŁ . . . ºŁØ PŒ Oºªø fi (Thuc. 1.102) “they came with no small crowd”; agency: ŁæÆEÆØ . . . NÆæE oæÅÆØ (Isoc. 8.39) “cures have been found by doctors”; cause: ø fi . . . IŁÆÆ (Thuc. 8.84) “died of illness”.

Having looked at the genitive, accusative, and dative, we have not quite completely exhausted the oblique cases of Attic. For a start, Classical Greek has remnants of other Indo-European case forms. Most notably, the original locative case is at times used (Schwyzer and Debrunner 1939: I: 549ff.):16 (4.4)

a YŒØ ‘at home’

(Xen.Hell. 1.6.5)

b %ªÆæE ‘at Megara’

(Ar.Ach. 758)

Its use was restricted to few nouns. Normally, a less archaic case was used: the dative, whose local sense was clarified by an inessive preposition, K: (4.5)

fi a K YŒø ‘at home’

(Xen.Cyr. 1.6.12)

b K %ªæØ ‘at Megara’

(Th. 2.31.1)

By the Classical Age, locative endings, although morphologically different from the dative, were semantically perceived and syntactically treated as forms of the dative (which had become the standard case to indicate location). This is proven by their combined use in coordination (see p. 11). A few other endings with case-like meanings—but not continuing IndoEuropean cases—were occasionally used (cf. also Chantraine 1961: 123ff.)— and these endings too had far commoner prepositional synonyms: -Ł[] semantically ablative (see Lejeune 1939): YŒŁ “from home” (e.g. Th. 4.90.3) corresponding to K YŒı (e.g. Xen.Cyr. 5.4.29) 16 Cf. Latin dom-i “at home”, Rhod-i “in Rhodes”, or Oscan vıá-ı´ “in the street”, all relic locatives. Endings of the other obsolete cases occur only (and very rarely) in non-classical texts—e.g. the dialectal (Delphic) ablative YŒø and the Homeric old instrumental -çØ (cf. pp. 130–1).


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%ªÆæŁ “from Megara” (e.g. Ar.Vesp. 57) corresponding to KŒ %ªæø (e.g. Thuc. 6.4.2) -

semantically allative (but used only on accusative stems): YŒÆ “homewards” (e.g. Thuc. 2.68.3) corresponding to N rŒ (e.g. Xen.An. 2.4.8)17 %ªæÆ “to Megara” (e.g. Ar.Ach. 524) corresponding to N %ªæÆ (e.g. Xen.Hell. 5.4.41)

-ŁØ

semantically locative: YŒŁØ “at home” is only pre-classical (Il. 8.513, Od. 3.303, 21.398) corresponding to K YŒø fi (e.g. Xen.Cyr. 1.6.12) ¼ººŁØ “in another (place)” (e.g. Xen.Ath.Pol. 2.7.5) corresponding to K ¼ººø fi (e.g. Xen.Mem. 2.1.20)

-

semantically lative: ººÆå “to many places” (Thuc. 2.47.3) corresponding to N ººf ı (Arist.Part.an. 655a) ¼ºº “to another (place)” (e.g. Thuc. 7.51.1) corresponding to N ¼ºº (Pl.Ap. 40e)

The use of these suffixes was short-lived, and they receive little space in Greek primers. They were, nonetheless, marking local “case–like” distinctions.

4.3 The prepositional syntagms of Classical Greek Greek prepositions18 could differ in their meaning according to the case marking of the noun they had as their object.19 For instance: (4.6) [ þGEN] åæ a H ŁH Øªı Æ ‘spending time with the gods’

(Pl.Phd. 81a)

17 The form rŒ is indeed attested, but earlier, in Homer (18 times) and Hesiod (3). The base YŒÆ (on which - is suffixed) is equivalent to rŒ—being either an accusative neuter plural (Wackernagel 1928: II: 205, Larsson 2007: 104–6) or—far more likely—the accusative singular from *r rather than rŒ. 18 Prepositions are quoted here in their most common form (such as ŒÆ rather than ¥ŒÆ, oŒÆ, oŒ, Œ, Œ) but variants of all items are to be understood as included. On such variation, see Krebs (1884: 6ff.). 19 We include in this section the occasional postposition, so that the broader title “adpositions” would therefore be more precise (cf. pp. 4–6).

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(4.7)

[ þACC] a c F e åæ ‘after that time’

(Pl.Resp. 537b8)

In the light of this (we noted at pp. 20–5 that such prepositions can be described as discontinuous morphs), only a list of [Pþcase] syntagms is meaningful. The Classical Greek prepositional inventory is traditionally divided into two groups. The first comprises the prepositions that also occur as prefixes, for example: I çd Æ F I çØ ººø I çØ ºÆ I ç º I çØ ºø

preposition verb prefix noun prefix adjective prefix adverb prefix

‘on both sides of the river’ ‘throw around; embrace’ ‘attack on both sides; doubt’ ‘thrown around; ambiguous’ ‘in an equivocal manner’

The prepositions of this type are conventionally termed “proper” ones. Some of the commonest meanings of the “proper” prepositional syntagms are indicated in Table 4.1. The list, of course, is meant to be representative but not comprehensive.20 Most treatises, grammar books, primers, and dictionaries of Greek (to name just the ones that we most commonly use in Britain: Abbott and Mansfield 1897: 176; Goodwin 1894: 254; Smyth 1956: 372) describe the meanings of each Greek preposition starting from the spatial one, and list the other senses as in a chain. Many of the main Greek philologists (e.g. Schwyzer and Debrunner 1950: II: 421ff.; Wackernagel 1928: II: 165ff.; Ku¨hner and Gerth 1898: II: I: 449ff., 526ff.; Becker 1841: 212; Cooper 1998: II: 1134)21 stated explicitly that they assumed local meanings to be primary—although often without clarifying what they meant by this, and without citing evidence that would justify their choice.22 One nineteenth-century scholar, writing on Classical Greek prefixes, simply stated: “whatever theory we adopt of the origin of

20

The traditional and ubiquitous classification of Greek proper prepositions is in three subgroups, according to the number of cases (one, two, or three) that prepositions could be conjoined with. Such a grouping system is, in my view, rather unenlightening—pace Hjelmslev (1932: 14) who sees it as a natural division—and is here abandoned. 21 This has been done not only by Indo-European philologists, but by philologists of languages of other families. For example, Arabic; cf. Wright (1898: II: 129). 22 This is true also of many scholars who discussed prepositions as a general category, not only in reference to Greek (p. 50).


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TABLE 4.1 ‘Proper’ prepositions I çþaccusative I çþgenitive Iþaccusative Iþgenitive Iþgenitive Øþaccusative Øþgenitive Nþaccusative KŒþgenitive Kþdative Kþaccusative Kþgenitive Kþdative ŒÆþaccusative ŒÆþgenitive þaccusative þgenitive Ææþaccusative Ææþgenitive Ææþdative æþaccusative æþgenitive æþdative æþgenitive æþaccusative æþgenitive æþdative

/þdative æþaccusative æþgenitive þaccusative þgenitive þdative ‰þaccusative a

Commonest meanings on both sides; around; about the time of on both sides; around; concerning; for the sake of up (along); all over; in groups of instead of away from; from a time; due to all over; on account of crossing; through (space/time/person/tool); each (time); after (in)to a place; towards a time; up to a number; for a purpose out of; after; on the . . . hand side; since; because of in a place; at/in a time; amongst going onto/over; against; for(time); in quest of; depending on staying onto (part of)/upon; in charge of; at the time of staying on; feeling about; on condition; up to/in the power downwards; sparsely in; in pursuit of; according to; in down from; down on(to)/in(to); against; concerning after (a time) together with; in accordance with; in a manner to the side/to the presence of; beyond from the side/from the presence of; by an agent at the side/next to/chez all round/all over; pertaining; approximately about a topic; being worth; concerning placed around; for the sake of in front of; before a timea; in defence of going facing/towards; towards a time; with a view to placed facing/towards; from (the direction of); (swear) by being facing/near; in addition to with; with the help of b going above/over/beyond; (also metaphorically); all over above; in favour/defence of; replacing to under; near the time of under; by (cause or agent) (at) under; through the power of up to a person

Greek visualizes time with the past being in front—i.e. æ—and the future behind—i.e. the “improper” preposition › [ ]ø. Dunkel (1982–3: 82ff.) therefore relates etymologically O ø to I and not K as is traditional (cf. Ruijgh 1994: 141). b On the relationship between the two forms, see Dunkel (1982–3: 55ff.).

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language, it is agreed by all scholars that its words are derived largely from notion of things in space” (Adams 1885: iii).23 The second group comprises prepositions which could not also be used as prefixes—and are, as a consequence, described as profoundly different (cf. Regard 1918: 63; Humbert 1960: 299; Schwyzer and Debrunner 1950: II: 533ff.; Cooper 1998: II: 1134). Greek grammars list them separately, and always classify them as “untrue”, “improper”, or “misused” (unechte Pra¨positionen, pre´positions non proprement dites, ŒÆÆåæÅ ØŒÆd æŁ

Ø).24 This is worse than a ‘terme . . . pas tre`s heureux’ (Humbert 1960: 299): it is a classification that does not recognize as prepositions words which are purely prepositions, on the grounds that they are not also something else. The absurdity of this has not prevented such labels from being adopted in Greek primers all over the world. Most studies of Greek prepositions ignore the “improper” ones altogether (e.g. Sobolewski 1890; Haggett 1902; Bonfante 1950; Horrocks 1981, to quote but a few).25 The commonest ones, with some of their commonest meanings, are shown in Table 4.2.26 The “improper” items usually governed only one case.27 They also tended to be polysyllabic (or indeed polymorphemic), to be less rarely intransitive, and perhaps more stressed. All this is to be expected in less grammatical(ized) lexemes, and it has parallels in other languages (cf. Yadroff and Franks (2001: 70–5) for Russian). As Hewson and Bubenik (2006: 48) noted, in all adpositional inventories there is a grammatical–lexical continuum, with the most grammatical(ized) items being seen as the proper prepositions, and the other end of the spectrum shading off into the lexicon. In the “proper” prepositions, the acute/ grave accent written on the second syllable of disyllabic items is thought to be a conventional way of indicating lack of accent, and when the preposition occurs

23

Despite the promising title “The Greek prepositions studied from their original meanings of designations of space”, Adams (1885) never discusses the origin of the words and had no interest in diachronic semantics; it is a book aimed at students; its approach is “psychological, not etymological” (Adams 1885: v–vi), and, above all, focused on what we commonly term prefixes. 24 This means that items that function unquestionably as prepositions (for instance, – Æ has the same meaning and the same syntax as ) are denied that label. 25 Brndal (1940: 13), predictably, stated that ¼ø, ø, or KŒ are not prepositions at all. 26 A few other adverbial expressions were very occasionally used “prepositionum interdum loco usurpata” (Rosberg 1868: note 2), but are here excluded owing to the minimal role they played in the history of the language. 27 Except for æØ which, like the “proper” æ, takes all three cases, the comitative “improper” prepositions – Æ and › F (and the extremely rare KÆø) take the dative; the accusative is used with the allative preposition ‰; all others require the genitive. The requirement of the genitive by all these forms is parallelled in the syntax of the improper prepositions of Latin, Old Slavonic, and OscoUmbrian, and agrees with the hypothesis—but is by no means proof—that these were originally nominal forms.


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TABLE 4.2 “Improper” prepositions

Commonest meaning

– Æþdative IØŒæ þ genitive Kªª þ genitive KŒ þ genitive æ Ł þ genitive KÆ þ genitive ŒÆ þ genitive K / Y ø / þ genitive KØ þ genitive ø þ genitive (K)ø þ genitive ø þ genitive ŒÆØ þ genitive ÆŒæ þ genitive Æ þ genitive åæØ / ¼åæØ / ‰ / ø þ genitive O -ø/ -Ł þ genitive æÆ() þ genitive æØ þ acc./gen./dat. º þ genitive ºÅ þ genitive ææø þ genitive æ þ genitive æ Ł þ genitive Œø þ genitive åæØ þ genitive åøæ/¼ı þ genitive

with opposite close to outside in front of opposite; against because of within facing outside above as far as following far from between as far as; until behind beyond, across all round except near far inside before before below for the sake of away from, without

after its noun, the original accent reappears, but on the first syllable (see Probert 2003: 137–41). The “proper” prepositions had a paroxytone accentuation, which was lost in the process of grammaticalization by phonological reduction; in this sense too, therefore, they are essentially an older equivalent of the “improper” prepositions. The two generations of prepositions differed in their non-prepositional usage, since the former cannot be prefixes; but as prepositions, they could be functionally and semantically equivalent. The semantic relationship between the two types—the extent to which their meanings overlapped—will occupy us at length.

4.4 The differences from prefixes The fact that it is customary to label as “proper” or “true” prepositions only those that can be prefixed (cf. e.g. Schwyzer and Debrunner 1950: II: 533;

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Smyth 1956: 366), highlights that Greek prepositions are traditionally thought to be the same category as prefixes. This is also unwarranted—and prefixes are not included in this study. Let us briefly see why. The main argument for a single category preposition/prefix is morphological: in most instances a preposition has an identical-looking counterpart amongst the prefixes. The identity is even clearer if one considers that writing a prefix and the following item as one word—instead of as two, as is done with prepositions—is only a matter of convention: N Æø verbal suffix Æø N preposition Y Æ Ø nominal suffix Ø N preposition However, just as there are “improper” prepositions that cannot be prefixes, there are some forms that only exist as prefixes: in Classical Greek there is no prepositional use of the prefixes ı - or Ø- (or, in Latin, of re-, ce-, dis-, or intro-). More importantly, the semantics of the “same form” used as a prefix may differ. For instance, in Classical Greek IÆ-, whose basic prepositional meaning is “up”, has the following meanings as a prefix which it could never have as a preposition: IÆ-Œø IÆ-Øæø IÆ- ÆØ IÆ-ªø IÆ-ıæ ø IÆ-Œæ Œ ÆØ IÆ-ŒÆºø IÆ-ÇøªæÆç ø IÆ-Œæø IÆ-Ø Œø

‘gulp down’ ‘bore through’ ‘shrink back’ ‘beget anew’ ‘have fever recurrently’ ‘begin to play’ ‘un-cover’ ‘paint completely’ ‘examine closely’ ‘teach otherwise’

So (cf. Lehmann 1983: 160) there is no necessary semantic equivalence [x pref-VERB y] and

[x VERB prep-y]28

It is interesting to note also that later Greek and other languages show that, after a form had developed into an adposition and a prefix, not only its meanings but also its forms may diverge. So in Greek today, ªØ is the prepositions, ØÆ- the prefix; in Latin, cum is the preposition but con- is the prefix; in French pour is only a preposition, per- the prefix, etc. 28 On Classical Greek preverbs, semantically quite different from their prepositional twins, see Adams (1885), Pernice (1962), and Cooper (1998: II: 1243–62).


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In Ancient Greek there are also syntactic differences between prepositions and prefixes. These are clear when the prefixes are attached to a noun, because (unlike the seemingly identical prepositions), they cannot case-mark the noun. Contrast the Classical Greek rendering of “they were armed” with an adjectival phrase and a prepositional phrase: (4.8)

a ºØ ‘in-arms[NOM] b K ‹ºØ ‘in arms[DAT]

q Æ were’ q Æ were’

The dative in the latter example is required by the preposition. This is decisive: si les pre´positions constituent une cate´gorie particulie`re au sein du syste`me, c’est qu’elles constituent un paradigme de´fini par la faculte´ de ses membres de re´gir des cas. if prepositions do constitute a distinct category within the system, it is because they constitute a set defined by the capacity that its members have to govern cases. (Hjelmslev 1932: 14)

Even those who had tried to define prepositions in semantic terms, noticed that syntaktisk undermarker de sig . . . i Motsætning til andre Partikler, ved en særlig Evne . . . at optræde styrende syntactically, they are characterized—in contraposition to other particles—by a particular property: . . . to exert government (Brndal 1940: 1).

4.5 The extent of prepositional use in Classical Greek Westphal (1888: 2) counted the occurrences of prepositions in the collected works of the classical prose writer Xenophon, and Koch (1889: 35) compiled similar statistics of prepositional usage in Isocrates. Their results (individually and aggregated as much as applicable) are shown in Table 4.3. Lutz (1891: 6) compiled statistics on the use of “improper” prepositions29 in a large corpus30 of Attic prose writers31 (Table 4.4). Lutz also gives total I am not counting –Æ ºª Æ such as KæÅ Æ fi þ genitive “without” (Lys. 12.98). Lutz’s corpus included: Aeschines, Andocides, Antiphon, Demosthenes, Dimarchus, Hyperides, Isaeus, Isocrates, Lycurgus, and Lysias. 31 Koch (1889) compiled statistics of Isocrates’ usage, and included in his list of counted improper prepositions some which Lutz had ignored, while leaving others out: – Æþdat. (1), Kªªþgen. (6), KŒþgen. (0), æ Łþgen. (0), KÆþgen. (1), ŒÆþgen. (52), Kþgen. (10), øþgen. (21), øþgen. (0), Æþgen. (1), åæØ/ ¼åæØþgen. (16), O [ ]-ø/-Łþgen. (0), æÆ[]þgen. (0), ºþgen. (22), ºÅ þgen. (1), ææøþgen. (15), æ Łþgen. (1), åøæ/¼ıþgen. (14). 29 30

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TABLE 4.3 Preposition I çþaccusative I çþgenitive Iþaccusative Iþgenitive Iþgenitive Øþaccusative Øþgenitive Nþaccusative KŒþgenitive Kþdative Kþaccusative Kþgenitive Kþdative ŒÆþaccusative ŒÆþgenitive þaccusative þgenitive Ææþaccusative Ææþgenitive Ææþdative æþaccusative æþgenitive æþdative æþgenitive æþaccusative æþgenitive æþdative

/þdative æþaccusative æþgenitive þaccusative þgenitive þdative ‰þaccusative

Isocrates

Xenophon

Total

0 0 0 34 79 388 115 470 540 781 214 127 190 288 32 53 216 51 194 157 458 1066 1 39 748 10 91 1 4 278 5 275 36 25

145 2 37 148 651 585 333 2050 1245 2512 1051 278 605 632 25 177 268 204 343 170 353 419 13 93 1451 633 169 550 13 130 35 699 56 0

145 2 37 182 730 973 448 2520 1785 3293 1265 405 795 920 57 230 484 255 537 327 353 1485 14 132 2199 643 260 551 17 408 40 974 92 25

Sources: Westphal (1888: 2) and Koch (1889: 35).

occurrences of both proper and improper prepositions in his corpus: “proper” prepositions 26,630 and “improper” prepositions 1,054, which gives a ratio of approximately 25 to 1.

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Prepositions in Ancient Greek TABLE 4.4 Preposition ‰ Y ø KÆø ææ ææø ø(Ł) º › F æÆ I æø/ø

Occurences Preposition Occurences Preposition 144 7 1 1 17 83 51 1 7 2

ŒÆ åæØ KØ ºÅ ææøø K åøæ Kªª æÆØ æø ZØ Ł

348 88 1 9 2 18 61 15 3 2

åæØ ¼ı – Æ Æ ¼Ł (I) KÆ (K )æ Ł ¼ø IØŒæ

Occurences 3 107 16 6 3 1 64 11 3 2

Source: Lutz (1891: 6)

4.6 Pre-Classical insights: the Greek of Homer To understand the background of Attic usage one should in theory look at Indo-European texts; this not being possible, one must take Homer as the best source—but with some strong caveats about Homeric Greek: it does not constitute an earlier stage of the same Greek as Attic. Attic was a distinct dialect which does not continue Homeric Greek; it is not an e´tat de langue of a dialect anyway: it is a literary creation, blending features of different dialects (Horrocks 1997b: 212ff.)—notably of Ionic, but not exclusively—and, to some degree, containing elements of different times. We must, nevertheless, accept Homer as the earliest form of alphabetic Greek available to us, going back to the mid–late eighth century BC, with later features. By the same token, it may be useful to make an occasional reference to Mycenaean, or Linear B, the most ancient attestation of Greek. However, we must bear in mind that Mycenaean too, besides being of quite arduous interpretation, is neither Old Attic nor an older form of the same Greek as that of Homer (see Ruijgh 1985),32 nor indeed a Proto-Greek wherefrom the various Greek dialects later sprung (Morpurgo Davies 1985: 75; Horrocks 1997a: 3ff.). 32 Mycenaean often seems less archaic than Homer, because Homer is part of a very ancient tradition: Mycenaean has traits in common with Classical Greek while Homer has traits of IndoEuropean lost to Mycenaean (cf. Horrocks 1981: 143).

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What follows is an outline of the features of Homeric Greek that are most relevant to our investigation.33 The focus is on where Homeric usage is at variance with Attic.

4.7 Case usage in Homer In Homer there are some noteworthy spatial uses of accusative, genitive, and dative, which are thought to be prehistoric (cf. Fritz 1997: 25). 4.7.1 Accusative We find many examples like the following: (4.9) Æ Æ ‘they went (to) the ships[ACC]’

(Od. 3.162)

In Homer the accusative is clearly used to mark spatial direction.34 We can see this in the use of both intransitive and transitive verbs: (4.10)

Œ ÆÆ ‹

Iª Å . . . æ H ‘all the goods I brought [to] my home’

(4.11)

ŒŒºÆ ıº ‘were called [to] assembly’

(4.12) Kªg › ª ø ‘I shall lead the way’

(Il. 7.363) (Il. 10.195) (Od. 7.30)

The fact that the local meanings of the Greek cases are more discernible in Homer—that is, in older usage—ties in with the theory that the spatial value is original (cf. Kuryłowicz 1964: 201ff.). In Classical Greek, this use is only rarely echoed in solemn Classical literature: (4.13) ¼ ı ŒÆ E º ‘gone [to] the city of Cadmus’

(Soph. O.T. 35)

(4.14)

(Soph. El. 893)

qºŁ Ææe IæåÆE ç ‘I came [to] my father’s ancestral tomb’

33

For a succint introduction to Homeric Greek, see Horrocks (1997b). This is not an unparalleled peculiarity: in Finnish (an unrelated language) the plain accusative, in addition to marking the object, has the same meaning of spatial and temporal extension: 34

(i) olen Suomessa yhde-n vuode-n ‘I am in Finland (for) a year[ACC]’ (ii) ha¨n ka¨velee kilometri-n ‘he walks (for) a kilometre[ACC]


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The accusative in Homer is also used to indicate temporal extension: (Il. 1.592)

(4.15) A w Ææ çæ Å ‘I was carried all day’ More generally, it indicates the extent to which a predicate applies: (4.16)

Æ ‰Œ ‘swift [in the] feet’

(passim)

Note that when Homer replaces this kind of accusative with prepositional constructions, allative prepositions, such as æ and N, are resorted to: (4.17) IŁÆfi Å Ø ŁfiB N tÆ ØŒ (Il. 3.158) lit. ‘to the immortal goddesses to the face she was similar’35 The plain accusative of extent is rarer in Classical Greek; when it is supplemented by a preposition, it is again the directional N: (4.18) ƒ ØÆç æ . . . N Iæ ‘those who excel in virtue’

(Pl.Ap. 35a)

4.7.2 Genitive In Homer, the genitive has partitive spatial sense, indicating location within a limited space: (Od. 3.251)

(4.19)

PŒ @æª q ‘he was not within Argos’

(4.20)

ç P çÆ Å ªÆÅ P Oæ ø (Il. 17.372) ‘no cloud appeared on the whole land nor on the mountains’

In Homer, the partitive genitive (the genitive “proper”) with a verb of motion can also express movement within a limited space: (4.21) º Ø Ł ı ÆØ ‘running in a vast plain’

(Il. 4.244)

Some Greek verbs require their object in the genitive (Goodwin 1894: 232ff.). These verbs, in the main, belong to a small inventory of semantic areas, and the genitive is used to mark a partitive object: KØŁı ø Kæø Oæ ª ÆØ

‘desire’ ‘long for’ ‘to crave’

35 A number of philologists (e.g. Harrison 1858: 139ff.; Kuryłowicz 1964: 201) have been taking explicitly for granted that the accusative case denotes extension even when marking the object of a verb.

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ıªåø ‘achieve’

åÇ ÆØ ‘strive for’36 This genitive is usually dismissed as adnominal: it is said to be a partitive genitive depending upon an ellipsed noun (in the accusative) which is meant to be the ‘true’ direct object. But it is difficult not to suspect that the Greek choice of the genitive was, at least to begin with, semantically motivated. The verb ›æ ª ÆØ, for instance, usually means “to crave”, but originally meant “to reach for”. Its Indo-European cognates, such as Latin rego and Sanskrit rj-/ rn˜j- confirm _ not _ say that the earlier meaning of “stretch out straight”. We should therefore il y a la` un pheńome`ne de rection, laquelle prive les de´sinences relatives de leur contenu se´mantique et les identifie, au point de vue de la valeur, avec la de´sinence de l’acc. du re´gime direct. we have a case of government, which empties the endings in question of their semantic content, and makes them identical, in terms of function, to the ending of the accusative of direct objects. (Kuryłowicz 1949: 138).

It is only in the course of time that the association of verb and case (just like that of preposition and case) becomes just syntactic government, semantically opaque even to the native speakers. The Ancient Greek genitive, especially in Homer, also had ablative sense: (4.22) ØŒ x Ø ‘he chased (from) his[GEN] house[GEN]’

(Od. 18.8)

(4.23)

(Il. 15.655)

H b KåæÅ Æ ‘they withdrew (from) the ships[GEN]’

In Homer, the ablative sense of the Greek genitive is particularly clear37—both when the case form is used on its own, for example: (4.24) I ı . . . ±º ‘she rose (from) the sea[GEN]’

(Il. 1.359)

and probably after prepositions: 36 This is not true only of Greek; the same happens in other languages, such as modern Russian (Wade 1992: 115), where most verbs requiring a genitive grosso modo coincide semantically with the Greek ones:

KØŁı ø ıªåø Kæø

åÇ ÆØ

‘desire’ ‘achieve’ ‘long for’ ‘strive for’

¼ :tkfnm ¼ ljcnbufnm ¼ :f:lfnm ¼ lj,bdfnmcz

The inventory of verbs requiring the genitive in Sanskrit (Speijer 1886: 87ff.) is also semantically similar to the Greek and Russian ones above. 37 Some traditional scholars have denied this (cf. e.g. Harrison 1858: 27ff.).

Prepositions in Ancient Greek (4.25)

127

(Il. 1.44)

B b ŒÆ’ ˇPº Ø ŒÆæø ‘he came down (from) the tops[GEN] of Olympus’

Ablative genitives (plain or after prepositions) are infrequent in the literature of the Classical age; they occur primarily in the high style of tragedy or in Ionic writers: (4.26) åE Æ . . . læÆ æÆF; ‘did a storm snatch (him) (from) the army[GEN]?’ (4.27)

(Aesch.Ag. 627)

. . . A ºıåæ ı / —ıŁH IªºÆa Æ / ¨B Æ; (Soph. Oed. Tyr. 151–3) ‘(from) gold-rich[GEN] Pytho[GEN] you came to splendid Thebes?’

(4.28) YŒı Ø B ›F ‘they retreat (from) the road[GEN]’

(Hdt. 2.80)

(4.29) Kææ øıf ŒÆa F å Œø ‘they threw themselves down (from) the wall[GEN]’

(Hdt. 8.53)

Besides comparative evidence from sister languages providing parallels for the Greek partitive genitive, there is comparative evidence proving an ablatival origin for the Greek genitive; for example, Latin (in which genitive and ablative cases are still distinct) has an “ablative absolute” corresponding to the Greek “genitive absolute”. Greek also uses the genitive to mark terms of comparison; this is taken as partitive by some (e.g. Lasso de la Vega 1959: 114ff.) but corresponds to an ablative in Sanskrit, Oscan, Hittite, and Latin: (4.30) Œæ

ø ıæø ºªø ‘stronger (than) countless[GEN] words[GEN]’ (4.31) fortior ‘stronger (than)

innumerabilis countless[ABL]

(Eur.Med. 965)

verbis words[ABL]’

A further, indirect hint of the ablative force of the classical genitive of comparison comes from its renewal in Modern Greek: although there is still a distinct genitive case, terms of comparison are marked by the ablative preposition I, unless they are pronouns: ıÆæ Ie æØÆ ºªØÆ ıÆæ ı

lit. ‘stronger from countless words’38 ‘stronger than me’

38 It has been claimed (Jannaris 1897: 369) that this construction is also classical, because of Isocr. 15.205: åØŒøı . . . Ie Æ H H åH. However, the sense there is not comparative, and most codices have K, which is much more plausible in that context.

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So, historically, the Classical Greek genitive continues the old ablative, and, in turn, is replaced by the ablatival preposition I in the modern language.39 4.7.3 Dative The most noteworthy fact about the Homeric dative is that it can express on its own spatial position (including comitation) or direction. These uses are more rare in Classical Greek, where prepositions were added: (4.32)

l . . . IŒæfi Å ŒæıçfiB ‘sitting . . . (on) the topmost peak[DAT]’

(Il. 5.753–4)

(4.33)

ÆNŁ æØ Æø ‘who resides (in) the sky[DAT]’

(Od. 15.523)

(4.34) Iº . . . ÆæØ Ø ‘wandering (with) comrades[DAT]’ (4.35)

(Od. 11.160–1) (Il. 7.187)

Œı fiÅ º ‘put (into) the bonnet[DAT]’

The second most noteworthy fact is that in Homer the dative is still used very extensively, more frequently than the genitive (De Mauro 1960: 214). 4.7.4 Adverbial cases The “unacknowledged” case-like endings that we find occasionally in Classical Greek (cf. pp. 114–15) are more frequent and widespread in Homer (see Risch 1974: 356ff.)—especially those of locative (-ŁØ) and of ablative (-Ł) sense: PæÆŁØ ‘in Heaven’ PæÆŁ I ºØŁØ ‘at Troy’ I ºØŁ MHŁØ ‘at dawn’ MHŁ

‘from Heaven’ ‘from Troy’ ‘from dawn’

Often we find also the third form, - , with lative (Chantraine 1961: 124) sense: 39 Traditionally, a sharp distinction is made between partitive and ablative functions. This is largely due to the fact that the Greek “genitive” continues the two erstwhile distinct Indo-European genitive and ablative cases. However, partitive and ablative/elative senses are, semantically, kindred notions (the partitive separates a part), and what links them in Greek is more than an accident of historical morphology. In Modern Greek, I replaces not only classical genitives of ablative sense, but also the classical partitive genitive; thus while Class. Gr. çÆª F “I ate this” became Modern Gr. çÆªÆ ÆP (plain accusative), the Class. Gr. çÆª ı “I ate (a bit of) this” (“partitive genitive”) became Modern Gr. çÆªÆ Ie ÆP (ablative preposition). Similar developments can be seen in the Latin use of de and the Finnish elative and partitive cases (p. 83), and in the Old English use of the genitive as partitive, gradually replaced by of.

Prepositions in Ancient Greek ŒEŁØ ‘there’ ¼ººŁØ ‘elsewhere’ YŒŁØ ‘at home’

ŒEŁ ¼ººŁ YŒŁ

‘thence’ ‘from elsewhere’ ‘from home’

129

ŒE ‘thither’ ¼ºº ‘to elsewhere’ (YŒ ‘to home’ postclassical)

As the examples indicate, these endings were also added to non-nominal forms. It is therefore perhaps disputable whether and which of these endings ought to be classified as case inflections—rather than as adverbial derivatives.40 There is nonetheless something that suggests that they had the status of case forms, at least at some stage: their occasional use with prepositions (including in anastrophe): (4.36) Ie !æÅŁ ‘from [Troy-from]’ (4.37)

(Il. 24.492) (Il. 8.561)

I ºØŁØ æ ‘[Troy-at] in front of ’

More intriguing was the use of the allative morpheme -, because it is debatable whether it is an ending or a postposition (for use and origin, see Risch 1969: 497ff.). A clear indication of its postpositional nature (cf. also p. 115) is the fact that it only appears on accusative endings, of whatever declension: rŒ-, -, Iªæ-, –ºÆ-, ºØ-, ŒºØ Å- (passim) We might take the very fact that it never occurs as a pre-position as a possible indication of its suffix status. But better evidence for its suffix status is its occurrence repeated on agreeing possessives: (4.38)

‹- - ‘to his[ACCþ] house[ACCþ]’

(Od. 1.83, Il. 16.445)

What we see here is a postposition in the course of becoming a case ending— a unique sighting in the history of Greek.41 The history of - does not, 40 It is nonetheless very likely that philologists denied case status to these endings because they are not relics of lost Indo-European case endings, even if some of these forms are attested in other IndoEuropean languages, e.g. Greek -, which is already Mycenaean -de (Palmer 1980: 45) recurs in Sanskrit -da, and Old Slavonic -do. Furthermore, some adverbs with such endings also take proper case endings: the stem of ÅºŁØ “afar” / ÅºŁ “from afar” / Åº “to far” / also occurs as genitive (partitive) ÅºF “afar” and (Liddell and Scott 1940: 1788a) as old locative ÅºE (=ÅºE). 41 The birth of the recognized Ancient Greek cases long precedes our earliest documents, but speculation does not need to be KŒ F c Z: there is, as we saw (pp.86–8), evidence from sister languages, and plenty more from Finno-Ugric and other language families, that cases can develop from postpositions.

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unfortunately, go on to shed further light on the diachrony of the morphology of Greek endings (nor does it tell us anything about the development of case meanings), because it ends where our records begin. The form - soon fell out of use: Classical Greek employs all these endings (-ŁØ, -Ł, - , -Ø, -) very much more rarely than Homeric Greek, and there is virtually no trace of them in the Greek of today. 4.7.5 The -çØ case In Homer we find another (unproductive) ending not used in Classical Greek: -çØ. This is undisputably a case form, as it is the relic of the Indo-European instrumental plural *-bhis and has remnants in Latin, Osco-Umbrian, Celtic, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. It still appears in productive use in Mycenaean as -pi, used as instrumental or locative plural of the athematic declension and of the -a declension.42 In Greek literature it is almost exclusive to Homer’s style— and even there it is an artificial device (Chantraine 1948: I: 235) usually resorted to metri causa. Its use in instrumental and comitative senses is well attested: (4.39) (4.40)

INSTRUMENTAL SENSE: ÅçØ ‘by dint of force’

(Il. 4.35)

COMITATIVE SENSE:

Zå çØ ‘with chariots’ also . . . Zå çØ

(Il. 12.114) (Il. 4.297)

But -çØ in Homer has many more uses. It appears (Monro 1891: 148ff.) instead of several other cases and is even found conjoined with them. Furthermore, it is used for all numbers, it appears on both athematic and thematic nouns, and also on adjectives, participles and even adverbs. More interestingly, it appears “governed” by most available prepositions: (4.41)

DATIVE SENSE:

çææÅ çææÅçØ Iæªfi Å ‘a clan bears aid to a clan’ (4.42)

(Il. 2.363)

LOCATIVE SENSE: ŒºØ ÅçØ º ºØ ‘was left in the tent’ (Il. 13.168) also with: æ (Od. 5.432), I ç (Od. 16.145), K (Od. 3.353), and K conjoined with a dative: K åØæd . . . ØæfiBçØ (Od. 15.148)

42 For more on uses and the evolution of -çØ in Mycenean and inscriptions see Nieto Hernańdez (1987: 227ff.), Morpurgo-Davies (1969: 47ff.), Hajnal (1995: 133ff.), and Thompson (1998).

Prepositions in Ancient Greek (4.43)

131

ABLATIVE SENSE:

ÆFçØ Içæ ÅŁE (Il. 2.794) ‘they would rush from the ship’ also with I (Od. 14.134), Ææ (¼from, Il. 12.225), KŒ (Od. 24.83), ŒÆ (¼down from, Il. 4.452), (¼from under, Il. 23.7) (4.44)

PERLATIVE SENSE—although

only with a perlative preposition:

Øa b Ł çØ ‘through the heart’

(Il. 5.41)

The same case form -çØ appears on nouns governed by prepositions that required different cases. Such an indiscriminate use in Homer must be due to metric requirements; yet one might also say that, used with prepositions, -çØ had come to be a semantically void government marker that simply linked a preposition with its object—in a role similar to that of the accusative in Modern Greek, the dative in Yiddish, or the genitive in Arabic.

4.8 The Classical Greek prepositions in Homer 4.8.1 Inventory In Homer43 we find, more or less, the same lexical items that constitute the prepositional inventory of Attic (Chantraine 1948: II: 82ff.). Peculiar to Homer are only some phonological doublets (I ç besides I ç, [æ] beside æ) absent in Attic Greek. 4.8.2 Government In Homer there are differences in the cases associated with adpositions. Homer makes use of a wider range of cases: three prepositions that in Attic take only either genitive or accusative (I, I ç, ), in Homeric Greek (and in deliberately elevated poetry, like Pindar’s) have, besides those two options, the ability to take the dative. Moreover, in Homer, plain cases are used in contexts where Attic would require a prepositional phrase. 4.8.3 Compounding Homer also attests the doubling of prepositions: (4.45) ÆæbŒ c B ‘past the island’

(Od. 12.276)

43 For an overview of Homeric prepositional syntagms, see Horrocks (1981: 187ff.), Luraghi (1996: 70ff.), Fritz (1997: 46ff.).

132 (4.46)

The history of Greek prepositions (Il. 15.628)

bŒ ŁÆØ ‘away from death’

(Il. 7.334)

(4.47) Iæe H ‘away from the ships’ (4.48)

(Od. 10.388)

ØbŒ ªæØ ‘out through the hall’44

Intransitive use was usually also possible, and some combinations indeed only appear as adverbs: ØÆæ, æØæ (see Ku¨hner and Gerth 1898: II: I: 528).45 These forms are also found (albeit infrequently) in Classical authors and, later, in the Septuagint. Note also prepositions like Bº, KŒ, or Œ: in Homer they occur both as a preposition and with a preposition: Simplex Bº çºø Compound Bº I[e] ÆPF

(Il. 16.539) (Il. 23. 880)

‘far (from) friends’ ‘far from it’

Simplex KŒe ŒºØ Å Compound KŒe Ie ŒºØ Å

(Il. 14.13) (Il. 10.151)

‘outside (the) hut’ ‘outside (the) hut’

Simplex Œa ºØ (Il. 5.791, 13.107) Compound Œa Ie å (Il. 18.256)

‘far (from the) city’ ‘far from (the) wall’46

Already so early in the history of Greek, therefore, combinations of an “improper” and a “proper” preposition were an alternative to a plain preposition; Modern Greek forms like ø I are therefore not an innovation. 4.8.4 Meaning What Homer shows is that the Ancient Greek prepositions, in our oldest alphabetic record, have “u¨berwiegend raümliche Bedeutung” (Fritz 1997: 282). Perhaps as a result of this, the main ancient Greek dictionary (Liddell and Scott: 1940: 491a) describes the spatial senses as the “oldest” usage. This is an intriguing fact, but does not prove that the first meaning of all ancient Greek prepositions was spatial.

It is possible (Dunkel 1982: 61) that Æ too was originally a combination of two prepositions, and [], but other theories interpret the -ı element otherwise (e.g. a locative case ending -*su). 45 For more complex structures (irrelevant to our investigation) see Basset (1994: 154ff.). 46 Later, the “improper” preposition is found after the NP: Ie B ı Œ (Hdt. 3.41) “far from the island” (cf. Modern Greek Ie e Å d ÆŒæØ). 44


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4.9 The syntax of Greek adpositions in Homer Many Greek prepositions did not have prepositional status in pre-Classical Greek. This is evinced by Homeric Greek, which sheds considerable light on the origin of Classical Greek prepositions as a syntactic category (cf. Horrocks 1981: 44ff.). In Modern Greek (and probably in Classical Greek) there are enough differences amongst local adverbs, prepositions, and morphologically identical prefixes for us to make some categorial discriminations; in the earliest records, such as Homeric Greek, there is no clear distinction between them (Schwyzer and Debrunner 1950: 419; Fritz 1997:1ff.). There were a number of words that functioned semantically as “local relators”, to use Lehmann’s term (Lehmann 1983: 146), which could occur before or after, near or far from N(oun)s and V(erb)s. Thus these items, best conceived of as adverbs (see Smyth 1920: 365ff.; Cooper 1998: II: 1134),47 were later able to become the adpositions and preverbs of Ancient Greek—with cognates in Latin (cf. Vincent 1999: 1118), and in the other daughter languages of IndoEuropean.48 Since the “relator” and the N could modify each other, either of them could precede the other—whence the possibility of developing both prepositions and postpositions. Homer has prepositions only sometimes. Hewson and Bubenik (2006: 1–3) have argued that the lack of inflection or any possible agreement marker on the “somewhat mobile preverb-cum-adverbial particle” is what caused the development of adpositional phrases in post-Homeric Greek, and that this is what made Greek syntax configurational, changing the typology of Greek altogether. In Mycenaean the category “prepositions” is clearly established, which shows that Homeric usage is a literary archaism. A phrase like “I go from the ship” would have developed thus (cf. also Saussure 1915: 253): Æø

47

the Greek genitive is also ablative: the phrase is semantically complete, although the meaning can be reinforced by a local particle like I (when the Greek local particles/adverbs started to be placed next to either the V or the N, initially they did so without governing case, and the case still had full semantic value).

The traditional view that “die prinzipiell altertu¨mlichste Verwendung der Pra¨positionen ist die adverbiale” (Wackernagel 1928: II: 165ff.) has been attacked by Hessinger (1978: 212ff.) who argues that “adverbial” and preverbial uses are prepositional uses with ellipsis of the noun. 48 Objections to this traditional postulation have been raised, mainly on the ground that attested languages rarely lack adpositions altogether; Pinkster (1984: 79), on this account, finds the theory “typologisch onaantrekkelijk” (unattractive). But languages with no pre- or postpositions do exist (notably several aboriginal Australian languages); and there is no doubt that most prepositions of Classical Indo-European languages did derive from adverbs.

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Æø g ¼ the particle comes after the noun: postposition, which in Greek was a receding option (“anastrophe”, cf. p. 139); Æø Ie the particle comes in the slot before the noun: literally, the pre-position; I Æø the particle precedes the verb; initially it remains a separate morpheme—a fact obscured by orthography, but discernible in some Greek tenses in which other morphs come in between: I- - ÅŒÆ, I- - Å. Homer attests clearly the classical prepositions in their earlier autonomous adverbial use: (4.49)

(ZłÆØ . . . ) BÆ K , K ¼æÆ Kæ

ÆØ ÆHÆ (Il. 9.361) ‘(you shall see . . . ) my ships, and inside, men eager to row’

(4.50) ª ºÆ

b A Æ æd åŁ lit. ‘laughed then (the)entire around earth’

(Il. 19.362)

In the latter example, for instance, æ makes no sense as a preverb and cannot govern the noun in the nominative. But in Homer the use of classical prepositions was multifarious: (4.51) Km æÆ Œºı Æ Km Å Km ÆPfiB (Od. 5.260) lit. ‘inside, braces, and sailyards, and sheets he in-tied in it’ It is frequently unclear whether they constitute intransitive, free-standing adverbial forms, or adpositions, or verbal prefixes. In many Homeric verses adverbial, prepositional, and preverbal roles are semantically (if not structurally) equally conceivable: ºçæø from [her] eyes away-from [her] eyes from [her] eyes

¼ away

ŒæıÆ tears tears tears

Ø (Od. 14.129) fall (adverb) fall (synsemantic with case) fall-off (preverb)

In some cases one interpretation is more plausible. Let us see some examples: (4.52)

Ie Ææd çºø fi ÆØ ºØŒØÆ ŒæÅ (Il. 1.98) lit. ‘from father[DAT] dear[DAT] give shining-eyed girl[ACC]’

Here I cannot be connected to either noun (Ææd and ŒæÅ) because— besides being nonsensical in this context—it cannot govern the case of either: it only takes the genitive. So it cannot be prepositional. The status of selfstanding adverb (“away”) is also unlikely, because it would not make sense: it is the restitution of a kidnapped girl that is being discussed—handing back to


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someone, not away from him. Therefore I here must be an in fieri (still detached) verbal prefix. Outside Homeric Greek, the compound verb Iø Ø “give back” is well attested, not only in classical Greek, but already in Mycenaean (a-pe-do-ke, a-pu-do-si). In Hesiod, whose Greek is very similar to Homer’s,49 we find: (4.53) K d Œø Œ&ºfi Å e æfi Å ‘there is (a) cave down, under a hollow rock’

(Hes.Theog. 301)

Here the presence of Œø (which, it is worth emphasizing, in pre-Classical Greek is only an adverb, not an “improper” preposition) probably precludes adverbial status for as well; hence the translation (with its comma), that takes as a “preposition” linked with the dative phrase Œ&ºfi Å . . . æÅ. But even when such “adverbs” appear with an inflected NP, they may not constitute a prepositional phrase. According to Horrocks (1981: 19ff.), in Homer there are: (i) adverbs that can be loosely linked to a noun; (ii) adverbs loosely placed before a verb but still linked to a noun (casemodifying). Moreover, as regards verbs, Horrocks (1981: 45) noted that the extent of cohesion between particle and verb varies.50 So there are also: (iii) intimately fused particle+verb sequences (they constitute a semantic unit and the choice of prefix is restricted); (iv) fully-fledged phrasal verbs with particles not modifying case-inflected nouns (nor occurring with nouns, “prepositionally”—nor on their own as adverbs); (v) compound verbs (like (iv)) but with inseparable prefix. In Classical Greek we see that once the prefix had become fused with the verb, the identical preposition is added before the noun (cf. Baldi 1979: 58): Homeric Classical

49

KŒ b 'æı Åd Åe B (Il. 1.439) KŒ BÆØ KŒ B (Th. 1.137)

‘Chryses came out of the ship’ ‘to come out of the ship’51

Usage similar to Homer’s is occasionally found in high-style Classical poetry—also as regards the spatial adverbs of ambiguous status. See, e.g., Moorhouse (1982: 93ff.) on Sophocles. 50 Note that the traditional term “tmesis” ( B Ø) means “cutting”; although it is acceptable in a purely synchronic description, it may seem to imply that the adverb in question was a bound preverb subsequently severed from the verb—precisely the opposite of what historically occurred. 51 Most Greek “prepositions” retained this peculiar capacity to function as verbal prefixes throughout the Classical period—but given the (historically increasing) differences between prepositions and preverbs we shall not look at preverbal use in any detail.

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The fluidity found in Homeric Greek is not so hard to imagine: it has a partial parallel in modern European languages such as German (see Miller 1985: 61ff.) or, better yet, Dutch. In Dutch we can see, coexisting synchronically, many a “particle” used as a preposition, adverb, or preverb. This highlights how a clear-cut distinction—at least for some languages or for a given stage in the history of one—may be more a matter of convenience than a reality of grammar. On the one hand, Dutch has a class of verbs with an inseparable preverb: for example bepraten “to discuss”: jij wilt de roman bepraten jij bepraat de roman jij hebt de roman bepraat jij schijnt de roman te bepraten

‘you want to discuss the novel’ ‘you discuss the novel’ ‘you have discussed the novel’ ‘you seem to discuss the novel’

The verb could be seen as monomorphemic, and the only reason for identifying the “inseparable preverbs” like be- as separate elements is not because they ever occur as unbound forms, but because the corresponding “unprefixed” verb also exists—in this case, praten “to talk”. On the other hand, there is also another type of verbs that have preverbs, although they are regularly detached in a number of constructions. For example, opbellen “to phone”: zij kunnen haar opbellen (undivided) ‘they can phone her’ but the other forms are split: zij bellen haar op zij hebben haar op-ge-beld zij schijnen haar op te bellen

‘they phone her’ ‘they have phoned her’ ‘they seem to phone her’

Grammars of Dutch call these the “separable verbs”, and Dutch dictionaries list verbs like opbellen as a single lexeme—just like the bepraten type. Op and bellen, however, are usually separated, and they appear together only in constructions that would cause them to be in uninterrupted sequence anyway. In the example above, for instance, one has to consider that the infinitive in Dutch is always clause-final with modal verbs, and therefore it just happens to follow op. The fact that here op and bellen are spelt as a single word is therefore only an orthographical convention and not true univerbation: there is no hard evidence that this sort of verb and its particle are ever a single unit. Indeed, not only is there a simplex verb bellen, but there exists also an independent preposition op—while there is no self-standing be, as we have seen. The dividing line between preverb and adverb (preposition) is therefore blurred.


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Moreover, there are prefixed verbs whose preverb is said to behave either way: to be separable or not. The interesting point is that the two forms of the same verb (that is, same verb-base and same prefix, but with inseparable preverb in one case and with detachable preverb in the other) not only have this syntactic distinction, but also present a phonological opposition (stress on the stem in one case, and on the prefix in the other), and a semantic difference (the verb with inseparable prefix has a more figurative meaning). Thus a “prefixed verb” such as ondergaan is in fact two verbs: (i) ondergaán – inseparable, which means ‘to undergo’: Ik moet de operatie ondergaan Ik onderga de operatie Ik ben de operatie ondergaan Ik schijn de operatie te ondergaan

‘I must undergo the operation’ ‘I undergo the operation’ ‘I have undergone the operation’ ‘I seem to undergo the operation’

(ii) ońdergaan – separable, which means ‘to go under’: de zon zal al ondergaan de zon gaat al onder de zon is al onder-ge-gaan de zon schijnt al onder te gaan

‘the sun shall already set’ ‘the sun is already setting’ ‘the sun has already set’ ‘the sun seems to be already setting’

Note that the meaning of the inseparable verb is a metaphor of the spatial meaning retained by its separable twin: as the particle loses its original local meaning, it also loses its stress, and becomes an indivisible part of the verb. The verb too loses its original spatial sense. Thus we should say that only the inseparable verb has a preverb: in the separable verb, what dictionaries classify as a preverb is a self-standing particle, akin to an adverb (an intransitive preposition). The distinction among (a) preposition, (b) adverb, and (c) preverb here is inappropriate. Indeed, not only does the independent simplex verb gaan also exist, but onder is also used as a preposition or as an adverb: in other words, it is a particle that can appear next to the verb (sometimes to the point of becoming a part of it) or next to a noun, or be an autonomous element.52 This is, broadly speaking, the e´tat de langue that we also find in Homeric Greek. We shall see a tendency for more Greek adverbs to become prepositions in post-classical texts. And practically all the spatial adverbs of ancient Latin— which had intransitive use only, such as coram or proxime—developed prepositional functions by the late classical age (Szantyr 1965: 259, 245). According to Vincent (1999: 1121), in Latin the (pro)noun occurring in a sequence like 52

For a synchronic analysis of Dutch usage, see Koopman (2000: 204–5).

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[ADV þ Acc(pro)N þ V], became reanalysed as object of the adverb instead of as object of the verb, thus turning into a prepositions: the Specifier became a Head. In Greek, when these adverbs specialized in adpositional use,53 a choice was gradually made as to whether they should precede or follow the noun phrase. In most Indo-European languages, their cognates came to precede the noun phrase, but in a few languages they follow it. So, postpositions are still prevalent in our records of Tocharian and Vedic, and indeed exclusive in Hittite (cf. Luraghi 1990: 35); on the other hand, they appear to be an archaism in most languages of Indo-European descent (except Umbrian), where we find mainly prepositions. Classical Indo-European languages gradually opted for either pre-positional or post-positional use of these particles. Thus in Latin, for instance, there are some such particles which prevailed as prepositions: Latin pro populo ‘on behalf of the people’

(> Spanish por [el] pueblo)

while in Umbrian (a sister language) the same forms were used as postpositions, and came to be used as suffixes (as they fused with the original case forms): Umbrian

poplu-per (Rix 2002: 58–62; Untermann 2000: 531)

Postpositions were phased out of Latin at an early stage; the form cum, however, survived both as prepositions and as a suffix: cum te ¼ tecum; while only the analytical form survives in Italian (con te), Spanish has fused the two (contigo). The development of spatial adverbs into prepositions in Romance languages re-occurred: some prepositions of Modern French (Marchello-Nizia 2002) come from terms that were able to function as adverbs—many also as prefixes—until the seventeenth century. In time, languages tend to generalize one of the two syntactic positions, starting with difference in markedness. In Finnish, preposing and postposing an adposition makes a difference in style, as prepositional use is becoming less common: [poikki tien] (archaic/poetic) [tien poikki] (standard)

‘across (the) road’

[yli ja¨rven] (archaic/poetic) [ja¨rven yli] (standard)

‘over (the) lake’

53 Horrocks (1981: 118ff.), very interestingly, suggests that they specialized as adpositions when their adverbial function was taken over by the items that we know as (later) “improper” prepositions; this suggests a sort of cycle.


139

In Greek, by Mycenaean times, the choice had clearly been made: prepositions are the rule and postpositions are therefore obsolescent and stylistically marked54—the opposite of Finnish. Ancient grammarians called the use of postpositions in Greek anastrophe, because they saw it as the reversal (IÆ æç “turnaround”) of the unmarked [prepositionþnoun] order: (4.54) H ¼ ‘from the ships’55

(Il. 2.91)

Anastrophe is attested mainly in Homeric Greek, and also in Classical Greek, as a rare variant of the normal prepositional use. We find it also with the “newer” improper prepositions (åæØ, åøæ, KÆ, and mostly ŒÆ), but pre-positioning is otherwise more common: (4.55) Æææø KÆ ‘in the presence of witnesses’

(Isae. 11.43)

(4.56) KÆ Æææø ‘in the presence of witnesses’

(Dem. 30.27)

Wavering occurs (for both “proper” and “improper” forms) even in the same author: (4.57)

çÆ æØ ‘about wisdom’

(Pl.Phlb. 49a)

(4.58)

æd çÆ ‘about wisdom’

(Pl.Hp.mai. 283a)

But the use of post-positional syntax in Classical Greek is totally artificial: a remark by Aristotle leaves no doubt: L Pd i YØ K fiB ØÆº Œø fi . . . x e ø ø ¼ Iººa c Ie ø ø . . . ŒÆd e `åØºº ø æØ Iººa c æd `åØºº ø ŒÆd ‹ Æ ¼ººÆ ØÆFÆ. things that no-one would say in speech . . . such as houses from instead of from houses . . . and Achilles about instead of about Achilles and all the things like that. (Arist.Poet. 1458b)

54

A reminder that Linear B cannot be regarded simply as pre-Homeric Greek is the fact that the archaic phenomenon of “tmesis” of verbal prefixes, so typical of Homeric style, is not found in Mycenean texts. 55 Note that it is incorrect to talk of retraction of the accent, since prepositions (when preposed) were proclitic (see Vendryes 1945: 239ff.). Their being unaccented was marked with a grave accent on the last syllable (the unmarked use). Greek postpositions (¼ in anastrophe) were normally autotonic, and appear accented on the first syllable; cf. Sanskrit u´pa (), pa´ra (Ææ), pa´ri (æ), and a´pa (I). On accentuation in proclitic words, see Probert (2003: 133–42).

140


The rules of anastrophe are much debated, for the accentuation of the papyri shows a disheartening degree of wavering and the grammarians give very contradictory directions (see Irigoin 1953: 94). This reveals that anastrophe was not just becoming rarer from Homer to classical times (to Koine´, when it practically disappeared—see Krebs 1884: 18ff.), but also that by the time of epic poetry it was already only an occasional and archaizing usage. The prestige of epic poetry first and of Attic prose later kept it artificially in use for centuries, but late Classical grammarians (upon whom much of our knowledge depends) had no living usage and relatively few original examples from which to draw rules. The Medieval scribes (to whom we owe the texts we read) must have been even more at a loss.

4.10 Before Homer Prepositions are known as a particularly difficult area for Comparative IndoEuropean Philology (cf. Sihler 1995: 439); in Greek, both proper and improper prepositions are of very problematic morphology—“rebelles a` l’analyse” (Humbert 1960: 299), even if most, perhaps all, words that we know as Greek prepositions go back to Indo-European—although with different meaning and function.Thus Greek I and Latin ante form a matching pair; there is a link between Greek ŒÆØ- in ŒÆ ªÅ (Thessalian ŒÆª[Ø), Mycenaean kasi-ko-no and the Hittite katti, katta—all related to Greek ŒÆ. Similarly, Greek K matches Latin in, Osco-Umbrian en, Old Irish in, Gothic in. Greek K matches Sanskrit api and (probably) Hittite appa. Greek corresponds to Sanskrit upa, Gothic uf, and, somehow, Latin sub.56 If the Classical Greek prepositions were originally adverbs, as Homer seems to suggest, what were they before that? Can we conjecture anything about the categorial origin of Greek prepositions—what “part of speech” they may have developed from? For some Greek prepositions we can easily reconstruct original nouns. In both Greek and across comparative evidence, we find formally similar prepositions, whose meanings are closely related or identical, and whose morphological differences match case endings. So, Greek I and 56 A few of the old Indo-European “adverbs” did not develop into Greek prepositions. Some of these are traceable in the etymology of other Greek words: the Latin cum, for instance, which is also attested in Celtic and perhaps Balto-Slavic, appears in the Greek ŒØ < *kom-yos (not related to the Greek / ). Other forms are preserved as prefixes outside Attic: the Latin au, which is also attested in Balto-Slavic and Illyrian, and corresponds to the Indo-Iranian preposition ava, appears in (probably) Cretan ÆP-åØ (cf. Schwyzer and Debrunner 1950: II: 448). Conversely, a few Attic prepositions have no clear Indo-European etymon. One of these is Ø, probably a Greek innovation. It has been linked to the root *dis, (attested in Latin, Germanic, and Albanian, but only as prefix) perhaps with the ending of , I, and ŒÆ (cf. Wackernagel 1928: II: 155; Bonfante 1950: 106)—but this is all doubtful.


141

¼Æ (also attested as ¼Å) have endings that look like locative and accusatives; the same alternation recurs in æ, æÆ, to which we can add æÆ (possibly an old instrumental). Likewise, ŒÆ is likely to be an inflected noun (see also Morpurgo Davies 1983: 304ff.) and it has a link with Œø (the latter perhaps originally being an ablative). Thirdly, the Aeolic Greek preposition (cf. also Hamp 1983: 193)—semantically equivalent to Attic —and the Mycenaean pe-da are (mutatis mutandis) a perfect match for the Latin nominal accusative pedem. They therefore provide formal evidence of the creation in Greek of prepositions from inflected nouns,57 in this case a noun indicating a body part (cf. pp. 101–2). There is also decisive evidence from Old Hittite (another ancient IndoEuropean language) confirming the etymological link between Indo-European prepositions and nouns. Hittite nouns such as ha-an-za (cf. Sihler 1995: 439), which goes back to *h2ent- meaning “face/forehead”, corresponds to Greek I “facing”.58 The same root can be seen in Greek in more complex adverbial/prepositional forms such as -Æ-Æ and -Æ-Ø (originally, perhaps, K governing the accusative and the locative of *ant-).59 This root also appears in the verb Iø “to face”. So we can posit that I is a noun *ant“face” in the locative, and that the genitive that follows it was originally an adnominal genitive. Therefore I must have been (Humbert 1960: 301) originally an improper preposition.60 This, let us note incidentally, further confirms that the supposedly immense difference between “proper” and “improper” prepositions is essentially a matter of age. Hittite, being the oldest attested Indo-European language, provides precious diachronic information. Classical Hittite (around the fourteenth–thirteenth centuries BC), had forms functioning alternatively as adverbs, postpositions, or preverbs—a situation very similar to that of Homeric Greek and Vedic. 57 Philologists have long thought that the end parts of Greek prepositions are case inflections; Giles (1895: 291, 300) suggested that I ç, K, K, æ, and æ are old locatives, and I, Ø, , and ŒÆ (to which we might add – Æ) are old instrumentals (cf. also Bonfante 1950: 112). 58 Similar consideration can be made, at least in the form of conjecture, for other Ancient Greek prepositions. The compound IØ-Œæ() is said to be a double nominal form (Œæı then being from the root of ŒæÆ “head”). A more daring suggestion (see Sihler 1995: 439) is the noun *g´hesr “hand” (Greek åæ) alleged to appear in the locative *g´hsri in åæØ[] and ¼åæØ[] “as far as”. Humbert (1960: 329) sees also a noun for “handpalm” *gu in Kªª. 59 We know for sure that Greek did make use—although marginally—of old PPs as prepositions: KŒ (KŒ þ “foot”) was so used, as was its more telling counterpart K (consisting of K, which required the dative, þ in the genitive by analogy with KŒH). 60 A possible link between the *ant- root and I ç has been conjectured (Jasanoff 1976: 124ff.): the word for “both” in Tocharian A (an Indo-European language) is a¯mpi but also a¯nt(a)pi which might be from *H2nt (¼ *ant-) þ *bhi (instrumental ending). An even more hypothetical link between I ç and I has also been suggested (Hamp 1977: 145ff.).

142


However, Old Hittite (sixteenth century BC) differs. Starke (1977: 127 ff.) has shown that although Old Hittite forms are very similar or identical to the classical ones, their use is not. We have a regular contrast between -a forms like anda “in” (cf. Lat. endo) and -an forms like andan, which in the later period will be used indifferently. At this stage the forms in -a (the so-called directive ending, also occuring in the nominal declension) are construed with a following directive or dative case, and apparently have a directional sense (cf. also Luraghi 1990: 133). The -an forms, on the other hand, have a static sense and a multiplicity of constructions: (a) with a locative/dative case preceding or following them; (b) with a genitive case preceding them; (c) with a possessive adjective in the nominative/accusative neuter form. There are other forms which complicate the picture further, but it is clear that the static forms are nominal, since they can be preceded by an adnominal genitive (not allowed in Classical Hittite): (4.59) (LUGA)]L-wa-asˇ pı´-e-ra-an king-GEN front ‘before the king’

(StBoT 12 Vs I 5)

Also, just as the directive -a ending is a case ending, so the -an ending is likely to be an accusative neuter ending. Otherwise constructions such as (4.60) pı´-e-ra-asˇ-sˇe-et ( ‘around the house’

in which the item that functions as a preposition is clearly an inflected noun. This is a repetition of the history behind its older synonymous preposition: æd YŒı ‘around the house’ which in classical times was perceived simply as [PþNP], but æ too had probably been an inflected noun.

4.11 Main synchronic characteristics of the Ancient Greek system 4.11.1 The choice of case in PPs depended on the semantics of the case This was not necessarily so in classical or post-classical times, because PPs tend to crystallize formally while they evolve semantically—but it was so originally (cf. Humbert 1960: 298). To understand how this worked, recall Planudes’ remark (cf. p. 49) that there is a correspondence between spatial notions and Greek oblique cases (cf. also Ku¨hner and Gerth 1898: II: I: 290ff.; Bortone 2002: 70–2): Accusative ¼ goal motion (allative) Genitive ¼ source motion (ablative) Dative ¼ state/rest (locative) We should then consider the case required by particular prepositions. It can hardly be a coincidence—a syntactic quirk of no semantic significance—that both Attic Greek prepositions expressing distancing motion or distant position, I and KŒ, governed only one case, that it was the same for both, and that it was the genitive (the old ablative, as Latin and Sanskrit confirm). Conversely, for the reinforcement of partitive expressions (also rendered by the plain genitive), the prepositions used were KŒ and I: (4.61)

KŒ º ø ıæÆ ıÆæÆØ ‘of many, he takes four’

(4.62) OºªØ Ie ººH ‘few of many’61

(Il. 15.680) (Thuc. 7.87)

61 A use of KŒ that may seem inexplicable is in expressions of the relative static position of an object, e.g. in KŒ çæØ ŒÆŁ (Od. 21. 420) “sitting on a stool”, lit. “from a stool”. The explanation is that in this passage Odysseus shoots an arrow from the location indicated. This use of KŒ also occurs in set phrases, such as KŒ ØA (Ar. Eq. 639) “on the right[hand side]”. This construction was renewed in later Greek: in Modern Greek the phrase is Ie Ø / IæØ æ “on the right/left” (with regular replacement of KŒ with I) just as one can say Ie Øa æØ “on one side”. But both Classical and Modern Greek can also construct those phrases with a preposition of location: Classical Greek Kd

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The dative, as we have seen, was also locative; and the dative is the only case that was used with the locative (in Attic) preposition K: (4.63) K ÆºÆ EØ åÅ ‘the battle at Salamis’62

(Isoc. 5.147)

The dative, being also comitative, was also the only option for comitative prepositions such as , – Æ, and the very rare › F and ªÆ. On the other hand, the allative prepositions N and ‰ appear only with the accusative: (4.64)

N ˚ØºØŒÆ I Ø ‘he sends off (in)to Cilicia’

(4.65) ‰ KŒE º ‘we sail to him’63

(Xen. An. 1.2.11) (Isoc. 4.121)

Something similar but slightly more complex can be seen in prepositions that could govern multiple cases. Observe, for instance, the use of Ææ. It pointed to an area at one side of the referent object, and thus indicated a region, while direction or want of it was indicated by the case. In Classical Greek we see: With the genitive (ablative): IªªºÅ lŒØ Ææa Æ Øº (Hdt. 8.40) ‘a message came from (at the court of) the king’ With the dative (locative):

ØFÆØ . . . Ææa fiH ØÆ Œºø fi (Xen.Cyr. 1.2.8) ‘they eat beside their teacher’ With the accusative (allative): Ææa c ª çıæÆ łÆØ (Xen.An. 2.4.17) ‘send to (at) the bridge’

Ø, Modern Greek c Ø, b Øa æØ, etc. There are, moreover, parallels in other IndoEuropean languages: cf. in Latin erat a septentrionibus collis (Caes.B.Gall.7.83.2), a dextra, a parte/de parte/ex parte, and phrases like ab oriente, a latere, a tergo (see also Sa¨vborg 1941: 41ff.). The same constructions are attested in Umbrian (Rix 2002: 52–4): nesimei asa “next to [lit. from] the altar” (Latin proxime ab); testru sese asa “at [lit. from] the right of the altar”. Languages of other families do the same, e.g. Turkish sag˘dan yu¨ru¨mek “walk on [lit. from] the right”. Similar structures are also found in Biblical Hebrew, and are mirrored in Biblical Greek: MFAOs O Ej OHF PJOl O Ej OH P‘l F ¯ ŁÅŒ f KŒ¯ (2Chr. 4:6) “put five on [lit. from] the right and five on [lit. from] the left”, Greek ØH ŒÆd f K IæØ æH. On K developing into N when linked with an (allative) accusative, see note 81 at p. 162–3. Not much credence can be given to the claim made by (amongst others) Humbert (1960: 305–6) that the occurrence of N and K with the genitive is real government. Phrases like K ` ºŒØØ (Od. 7.132) “in Alcinous’(house)” or E N `ªŁø (Pl.Symp. 174A) “dinner at Agathon’s ” are cases of ellipsis of another noun (and retention of its adnominal genitive) and not a government of a (partitive) genitive. There are parallel constructions in Modern Greek and in English, although in the Greek of today all prepositions can only govern the accusative: E F (< N F) ˚ Æ “dinner at Kostas’”. 62 63


145

This system is at its clearest in Homer. Homer (and authors that, if not so archaic in date, were so in style) attests the Greek [Pþcase] system at its inception, when the functional burden was carried by the inflected NP, and the preposition was to some extent optional (Horrocks 1981: 19): in modern terms, it was a specifier, while the head was the NP. The noun, it has been said (Hewson and Bubenik 2006: 12), governed the “preposition” rather than vice versa. This stage enables us to see more distinctly why a preposition and a case were conjoined. The aim often was (i) the reinforcement of the meaning—or the reinforcement, and therefore disambiguation, of one of the several possible meanings—of the plain case form. The distinction between these two scenarios is neat only in extreme instances. Another aim often was (ii) the addition of an extra layer of meaning—the distinction between this scenario and the previous ones also, at times, being fuzzy: (i) Reinforcement or disambiguation Plain dative (¼semantically also comitative) case # – Æ

‘at one with’ þ dative (¼comitative) ‘jointly with’ þ dative (¼comitative)

¼ ‘together with’

For example – Æ —ÆæŒºø fi (Il. 16.257)

f %ºø fi (Il. 3.206)

‘with Patroclus’ ‘with Menelaus’

Plain genitive (¼semantically also ablative) case # Bº ¼æ çØ åøæ Œ åÆ ¼ı

‘far off/from’ ‘aloof from’ ‘apart from’ ‘separately’ ‘far from’ ‘split from’ ‘away from’

þ genitive (¼ablative) þ genitive (¼ablative) þ genitive (¼ablative) þ genitive (¼ablative) ¼ ‘away from’ þ genitive (¼ablative) þ genitive (¼ablative) þ genitive (¼ablative)64

For example Bº ¼æ l ¼ººø

64

(Od. 12.354) (Il. 1.498)

‘far/away from the ship’ ‘sitting away from the others’

Note also the use with the ablative suffix -Ł: ¼ı K Ł (Il. 15.213).

146


çØ Iºı ŒÇø º Ø åøæd O ø K H ÅH Œa XºŁ r "æØH åÆ

(Il. 6.443) (Eur.Or. 272) (Od. 14.496) (Soph.Aj. 750)

¼ı Å&ø

(Il. 13. 556)

‘skulk away from the battle’ ‘away from my sight’ ‘we went far from the ships’ ‘alone, separated from the Achaeans’ ‘aloof/away from the foes’

(ii) Additional meaning, e.g. dimensionality (4.66)

I ‘up/on/over’ þ accusative (¼ allative) > ‘upwards’: Œ I[a] łÅºc æı Æ (Od. 22.193) ‘they raised it on a high pillar’

(4.67) I ‘up/on/over’ þ accusative (¼ extensive) > ‘extending over’: "åÆØœ N d I[a] ¯ ººÆ (Il. 9.395) ‘there are Achaean women all over Greece’65 (4.68)

I ‘up/on/over’ þ dative (¼ locative) > ‘on top’: y . . . Ia ¼Œæø fi ‘he slept on the top (of the mountain)’

(Il. 14.352)

With prepositions that took more than one case, the spatial sense of the case thus added something to the overall meaning of the prepositional phrase:

þ genitive ¼ ‘from under’66 þ dative ¼ ‘(at) under’ þ accusative ¼ ‘to under’

þ genitive ¼ ‘from the side of ’ Ææ þ dative ¼ ‘at the side of ’ þ accusative ¼ ‘to the side of ’

65 The addition of a preposition to the “non-case” forms such as -Ł, -ŁØ, etc. can be seen in the same light. The prepositions added were again either

(i) semantic reinforcement, e.g. K PæÆŁ (Il. 8.19) and I PæÆŁ (Od. 11.18) “from [the skyABL]”; (ii) a further element of the meanings (dimensionality beside movement or lack of it), e.g. PæÆŁØ æ (Il. 3.3) “[the skyLOC] in front of”. 66 The ablative sense of the genitive after a preposition was rare and disappeared before the Classical Age (Humbert 1960: 320; Forman 1894: 64). To take one specific example, the expression e åŁ is ablative only once in Hesiod (although it occurs there three more times), and never ablative anywhere else—although attested twice in Homer, once in Semonides, four times in Aeschylus, three in Euripides, two in Sophocles, once in Plato (in a quotation), and once in Ion.


147

þ genitive ¼ ‘from the vicinity of ’ æ þ dative ¼ ‘in the vicinity of ’ þ accusative ¼ ‘to the vicinity of ’ This was the state of affairs at the beginning of the history of these syntagms. It is partly reflected in Classical usage, but it is most clear—as one would expect—in pre-Classical Greek. Remnants of this system are visible also in Latin, and in today’s German Wechselpra¨positionen. Let us see how Homer uses : With the dative (locative): With the dative (lative): With the genitive (ablative): With the genitive (partitive): With the accusative (allative):

e

d ªÆ ÆåÇ ªÆEÆ (Il. 2.784) ‘the earth resounded greatly under (his) feet’ ÇıÆ ç –æ Æ Ø . . . ¥ı (Od. 3.478) ‘they yoked the horses under the chariots’ ¥ı b ºF Æ e ÇıªF (Il. 8.543) ‘they loosed the horses from under the yoke’ e æØ ıå Æ (Il. 4.106) ‘having caught under his breast’ XºÆ BºÆ (Il. 4.279) ‘he drove the flock under (¼into) the cave’

The division of labour shown here by Greek (dimensionality expressed by prepositions, directionality mostly by cases) is a universal tendency. Although it is possible for a language to use adpositions to indicate dimensionality and directionality (as, for example, in English), and even to express the two in the same adposition (as, for example, in Hungarian), languages that combine adpositions and case forms usually express directionality with the bound morphemes, and dimensionality with the independent morphemes (cf. Kilby 1981: 120). Thus: from under (Hungarian alo´l) ! Homeric Greek þgenitive at under (Hungarian alatt) ! Homeric Greek þdative to under (Hungarian ala´) ! Homeric Greek þaccusative. 4.11.2 Many prepositions show synonymy—especially in non-spatial senses The most striking feature of the Ancient Greek prepositional system as a whole is the sheer number of prepositional syntagms. A vast inventory of prepositions (often differing only in elusive nuances) was combined with different cases producing a system of exceptional richness and subtlety.67 This 67 According to Brndal (1940: 92) Greek prepositions were decisive for the development of Western philosophy, since this was based on Greek and on the nuances that Greek prepositions express.

148


also means that many items were synonymous, and so dispensable. We find cases and manifold prepositions with the same meaning. For example, to indicate the material of which something is made, reflecting the common “the object comes out of the substance” metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 73), Herodotus writes: (4.69)

åÆºŒF Ø ÆØ a Iªº ÆÆ (Hdt. 5.82) ‘of bronze they make the statues’

[plain ABLATIVE/GENITIVE]

(4.70)

Kj ºø ØFÆØ a ºEÆ (Hdt. 1.194) ‘to make of wood the ships’

[Kj þ ABLATIVE/GENITIVE]

(4.71) Ipe ºø ØÅ Æ (Hdt. 7.65) ‘of wood made’

[Ip¸ þ ABLATIVE/GENITIVE]

Add also Diodorus (perhaps from the expression of means): (4.72) YøºÆ di[a] Kº çÆ (Diod.Sic. 17.115) [di› þ ABLATIVE/GENITIVE] ‘idols of ivory’ The variety is more remarkable in non-spatial expressions. With some nonspatial referents, even prepositions with totally dissimilar spatial meanings become equivalent (cf. pp. 36–41). Observe prepositional phrases introducing the topic:68 (4.73)

peqd NæÅ ‘(talk) about [peqß] peace’

(4.74) Ø Ilvd B º ªø ÆØ ‘this I say about [Ilvß] your daughter’ (4.75)

ª Å . . . Kr c ª çıæÆ ‘the opinion about [Kr] the bridge’

(Thuc. 5.55) (Eur.Hec. 580/1) (Hdt. 4.98)

(4.76) Kpd ŒÆºF º ªø ÆØ ‘talking about [Kpß] a handsome boy’

(Pl. Chrm. 155d)

(4.77) ÆFÆ . . . jata ø —æ H å º ªØ ‘this we can say about [jat›] all the Persians’

(Xen.Cyr. 1.2.16)

(4.78) u“pºq Ł ÆY å IŒø ‘I hear shameful things about [u“pe†q] you’69

(Il. 6.524)

68 In fact, even a plain case was a possible option—but, predictably, only in the earlier stages of the language: Nb Ø Ææ (Od. 11.174) “tell me (about) my father[GEN]”. 69 The “over” metaphor is a common way to introduce a topic: Late Latin supra (and so Spanish sobre and French sur), English on, German u¨ber, Modern Greek ø, Turkish u¨zerinde, etc. (cf. p. 75–6)


149

Observe also: IªŒfi Å

f IªŒÆfi æe IªŒÆ ŒÆ[a] IªŒÅ K IªŒÅ P[e] IªŒÅ Ø[a] IªŒÅ

(Od. 1.154) ‘out of necessity’ (Pind.Pyth. 1.51) ‘out of necessity’ (Aesch.Pers. 569CODD.) ‘out of necessity’ (Xen.Cyr. 4.3.7) ‘out of necessity’ (Soph.Phil. 73) ‘out of necessity’ (Od. 19.156) ‘out of necessity’ (Pl.Ti. 47e) ‘out of necessity’

å N å ŒÆa å a åı Øa åı

f åØ K åØ

(Aesch.Sept. 58) (Ar.Ach. 686) (Hdt. 1.124) (Pl.Prt. 332b) (Soph.Aj. 822) (Soph.Aj. 853) (Pind.Nem. 5.35)

‘quickly’ ‘quickly’ ‘quickly’ ‘quickly’ ‘quickly’ ‘quickly’ ‘quickly’

ç ø fi

ç ø fi I çd ç ø fi æd ç ø fi KŒ ç ı Øa ç ı e . . . ç ı æe ç Ø a ç ø

(Aesch.Supp. 786) (Philoch. F135b8) (Eur.Or. 825) (Aesch.Cho. 35) (Soph.Ant. 180) (Thuc. 6.59) (Xen.Cyr.3. 1.25) (Il. 17. 667) (Isoc. 2.26)

‘out of fear’ ‘out of fear’ ‘out of fear’ ‘out of fear’ ‘out of fear’ ‘out of fear’ ‘out of fear’ ‘out of fear’ ‘out of fear’

These different ways to express the same thing underscore two key points on synonymous prepositional constructions: (i) There can be neutralization of semantic distinctions—contextual synonymy reached by different routes—as we have seen in other languages (p. 77-8). In the case of Greek, considering this development in diachronic terms, this shows that some Classical Greek prepositions had become largely superfluous and could be discarded. (ii) When a new construction appears, it does not oust the older equivalents at once. New and older constructions co-exist for a while, even in the same language variety—indeed even in the same idiolect. 4.11.3 Some prepositions can be followed by [Pþcase] instead of just case Since Homer—and in classical texts—we see combinations such as: Bºþgenitive alternating with Bº I KŒþgenitive alternating with KŒ I ¼åæØ þ genitive alternating with ¼åæØ N:

150


(4.79) Ie B K BÆ ıºHØ åÅ, ¼åæØ N ˚øæÆ ‘after the battle of Babylon until Cotyora’

(Xen.An. 5.5.4)

This indicates that PPs could also expand into P-PP (cf. pp. 29–31). 4.11.4 Prepositions with similar spatial sense are often alike in other meanings There is a tendency for similar or identical abstract meanings to occur in pairs of prepositions with (roughly) the same spatial meaning. Sometimes such correspondences are also found crosslinguistically. This is an interesting fact because it suggests there is a logic in the co-existence of spatial and nonspatial senses in a preposition—against the idea of random polysemy. For instance, the main Ancient Greek preposition referring to a region around an object is peqß, equivalent to English “about”. Note that æ, just like the English “about”, may mean, besides “along the perimeter of ”, also more generically “everywhere or somewhere within the region around”: (4.80)

PŒ KªåÆ Ææg Iººa æd Æºı æÆ q (Xen.Hell. 1.3.10) ‘he was not there, but (somewhere) around Salumbria’

A meaning of æ related to the above is “approximately” for numbers. It is a sense that English too expresses by “around” or “about”: (4.81)

æd ÆŒ ı ‘about seven hundred’

(Xen.Hell. 11.4.5)

Other non-spatial meanings of æ are remarkably parallel to the non-spatial sense of English “about”, for example “concerning (a topic)”: (Od. 17.563)

(4.82) rÆ ªaæ s æd Œı ‘I know well about him’ (4.83) KØ ø æd a Ø ‘knowledgeable about the tactics’

(Xen.An. 2.1.7)

It also indicates the object at stake (what the struggle is about): (4.84)

æ åø æd łıåB ‘running for his life’

(4.85) Icæ æd x Ø ÆåØ Œ

Ø ‘man fighting for his own possessions’

(Hdt. 9.37) (Od. 17.471)

We have seen that another, earlier, preposition, I ç, expressed a local meaning practically identical to that of æ. They were not—at least originally—full


151

synonyms, because I ç really meant “on both sides of ”. But the broader sense of “around” was also possible, and we find it as early as in Homer (in the ancient construction with the “locative” dative): (4.86) Æ Æ I çd %ØØfi Å ‘they stood around Menoetius’ son’

(Il. 17.267)

What is interesting here is that the abstract senses of I ç are also very similar to those of æ: (4.87) I çd f Ø åØºı ‘approximately two thousand’ (4.88) I ç ¯ º fi Å . . . å ŁÆØ ‘fight on account of Helen’ (¼the stake) (4.89) I çd b fiH ŁÆø fi ÆPB º ªÆØ . . . ‘concerning her death they say . . .’(¼the topic)

(Xen. An. 1.2.9) (Il. 3. 70) (Hdt. 3.32)

And besides I ç and æ, prepositions that point directionally to a region (N and æ with the accusative) show also the non-spatial meaning “concerning”. Another pair of virtually synonymous prepositions that developed parallel meanings is (þ genitive) and /. Their spatial meaning is comitative70 (for , originally interessive: “to be amidst”): (4.90)

XºıŁ . . . sfm . . . %ºø fi ‘he came with [ ] Menelaus’

(Il. 3.206)

(4.91)

ŒÆŁ leta H ¼ººø ‘sitting with [ ] the others’

(Pl.Resp. 359e)

The archaic comitative (locative) preposition was also synonymous with (þ genitive) in its non-spatial senses—which suggests a rationale in their polysemy. For instance, they both express a quality possessed: (4.92) sfm ªºfi Å IæfiB . . . ¼ŒØØ ‘spouse of [ ] great virtue’ (4.93) leta IæB ØøŒ ‘having lived in [ ] virtue’

(Od. 12.143) (Aeschin. 84.15)

or instrument (replacing the older plain dative):

70

On þacc. developing the sense “after” (unlike ) see Wackernagel (1928: II: 241ff.).

152 (4.94)

The history of Greek prepositions nfm E Ø . . . æ Æ ‘having destroyed with [ ] these darts’

(4.95) leta ø ‘through [ ] labour’

(Soph.Phil. 1334/5) (Lys. 2.55)

or conformity to a standard: (4.96)

sfm fiH ØŒÆø fi ‘in accordance with [ ] justice’

(4.97) leta H ø ‘in accordance with [ ] the laws’

(Xen.An. 2.6.18) (Antiph. 136.25)

was stylistically higher and, at all stages of the history of Greek, rarer than : statistics of occurrence compiled by Mommsen (1895: 6ff.) show to have been reserved primarily for “poetic” register: in Plato in Demosthenes in Aristophanes in Euripides

29 509

12 266

9 330

197 101

was used less than , and in post-Classical times it dropped out of spoken use, while lived on. Although their different fates must have also been connected to the waning of the dative, required by but not by , one is tempted to speculate that , being the older comitative preposition, had, so to speak, run its course. This ties in with the fact that the attestations of with concrete spatial sense are fewer than for —suggesting again that the spatial meaning is earlier. The preposition æ can now be assessed, in tandem with its older semisynonym I, just as æ was considered in relation to I ç. We may choose to translate æ as “before” and I as “opposite” but, basically, they both meant “in front of ”—although spatial examples of I are extremely rare: (Aeschin. 2.148)

(4.98)

K d pqe H OçŁÆº H æçÆÆØ ‘it appears in front of [æ] my eyes’

(4.99)

Imtd ÆØæø (not Attic, but Cretan—Leges Gortyn.1.40) ‘in front of [I] witnesses’

Note that their abstract meanings also largely overlap: (4.100)

º Imt’ NæÅ ‘war instead of [I] peace’

(Thuc. 1.120)

Prepositions in Ancient Greek (4.101) º pqe NæÅ Æƒæ ÆØ ‘he chooses war instead of [æ] peace’

(Hdt 1.87.4) (Il. 24.254)

(4.102) ( ¯Œæ . . . Imtd . . . ç ŁÆØ ‘to die on behalf of [I] Hector’ (4.103)

ıºF ŁÆØ pqe H ‘decide on your behalf [æ]’

153

(Xen.An. 7.6.27)

(4.104) Imtd F ÇB IŁfi Å ŒØ PŒºH Æƒæı ı (Isoc. 9.3) ‘rather than [I] living they choose to die gloriously’ (4.105)

pqe ı ŁÆØ . . . ºØ ‘rather than [æ] this he would choose to die’

(Pl.Symp. 179A)

Note also the abstract senses of another word for “in front of ”, p›qor: (4.106) !ı&Æ p›qor å . . . ¥ı ‘guided . . . horses in front of the-son-of-Tudeus’

(Il. 8.254)

(4.107) IºçH j p›qor Ł ºØ ŁÆE (Eur.Heracl. 536) ‘she wants to die rather than/instead of her brothers’

4.12 Main diachronic trends of the Ancient Greek system We can already spot changes from the pre-classical to the late classical period, if not clues to forthcoming developments. 4.12.1 From prehistoric times, cases show a tendency to merge Already by the time of our first alphabetic record, Greek was clearly reducing its case inventory (cf. Szemereńyi 1990: 166ff.), and indications of this trend are detectable in Mycenaean (see Risch 1986; Hettrich 1985; Morpurgo Davies 1985: 98ff.; Hajnal 1995: 16ff.). The trend is even predictable, if the level of stability of the inflectional paradigms is studied (cf. Coleman 1991: 201ff.) and case hierarchies across languages are considered.71 The case mergers in Greek cut the Indo-European inventory of five oblique cases down to three by the classical age (and to two by the modern period) (Figure 4.1). 71 There is evidence of the existence of a universal case-inflection implicational hierarchy—a chain of cases in which each case presupposes the previous one(s)—although its precise structure is still debated. Blake’s proposal (1994: 89) fits Greek too: NOM

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