A Construction Grammar approach to Ancient Greek argument structure constructions

Two-place verbs with nominative subjects in Ancient Greek can take either the accusative or the genitive or the dative as a second argument. Typically, the same case can combine with groups of cases that are semantically quite disparate: Greek cases are highly polysemous morphemes. Diachronically, polysemy is the outcome of case syncretism, i.e., the merger of inflectional categories. Accounting for case polysemy in synchrony, however, is a more complicated matter: crucially, information about diachronic developments is not available to speakers. Traditionally, case selection by specific verb is explained based on the individual meaning of cases. Contrary to this well-established tradition, in this paper I consider the case of the second argument as part of whole constructions, and focus on construction variation among NomAcc, NomDat and NomGen argument structure constructions. More specifically, I view the occurrence of one of the three constructions with semantically different verb groups as partly due to constructional polysemy but partly also constructional homonym

Crosslinguistic variation in partitives

As has been highlighted in the literature (see Luraghi & Huumo 2014b: 3–4) the word ‘partitive’ has often been used in reference to different types of linguistic items or constructions without further specification. In recent years, a number of studies have called attention to the different features of items covered by this label. In particular, it has been shown that partitive cases of languages such as Finnish, Estonian and Basque have much in common with partitive genitives known from the Indo-European languages as well as with partitive articles features by some Romance languages, which in their turn parallel partitive determiners, verbal affixes or other clitics from Oceanic languages. This apparently heterogeneous array of different items did not receive a unified treatment in spite of striking similarities and of extensive language-specific studies, partly because the label ‘partitive’ blurred the difference between these items and partitive constructions

Definite referential null objects in Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek and Early Vedic are pro-drop languages which allow for referential null objects. In this paper we give an overview of the various conditions under which null objects are licensed and compare their use in both languages. In Greek and Vedic null objects occur frequently in conjuncts, be it clauses or sentences. They are also attested with participles embedded into finite sentences. A third type is the syntactically unrestricted discourse conditioned null object, which is typically an anaphora. In Vedic, however, it can also be used kataphorically and with extratextual reference

Basic valency orientation in Hittite

The paper discusses basic valency orientation in Hittite, based on the typology proposed in Nichols et al. (2004). Verb pairs employed for testing basic valency indicate a clearly transitivizing character of this language. The high productivity of causative derivation is shown by the fact that morphologically marked causatives are derived from both stative and change-of-state verbs. In the case of the latter, a minor pattern is also attested, whereby valency alternation is encoded through voice (active/middle) alternation. Since neither voice can be considered derived with respect to the other, verbs that display this behavior are indeterminate as to basic valency orientation. In spite of the limited extent to which voice indicates valency alternation, this finding becomes more significant when set into the framework of valency alternation in the early Indo-European languages, and sheds some light on the original function of the Hittite and of the Indo -European middle voice