Greek and Roman Grammarians on Motion Verbs and Place Adverbials
نویسنده
چکیده
My aim in this paper is to survey what Greek and Roman grammarians had to say about the syntax and semantics of motion complexes — that is, syntagmatic units comprising a motion verb and a spatial adverbial. This topic involves a number of research areas that are much studied today, such as the linguistic representation of the structure of events, and the so-called “syntax-semantics interface.” I’ll discuss both the strengths and the limitations of the ancient approach, and I’ll also go into some of the motivations for the development of this approach (in terms of both language-internal and external factors). First, though, I’d like to situate the relevant phenomena in the context of a bit of modern theory. In the generic analysis of a motion event, we pick out four components: a dynamic figure moves along a path against a static ground in a particular manner. Languages differ in how they encode these various components. In a verb-framed language such as Latin, path is characteristically packaged in the verb: for instance, the verb pergo means ‘move forward towards a destination’. In English, by way of contrast, it is common for the verb to encode manner, and path is coded by a satellite: a child toddles down the street, a messenger rushes up to the king, and so forth. 14, 8, 12 Motion events have an internal structure: the figure proceeds from a source at some time t1 to a goal at t2; during the interval t2− t1, the figure
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تاریخ انتشار 2003