The productivity of ancient Greek Prepositions in modern Greek nominalizations

Abstract

Ancient Greek prepositions -though not occurring by themselves in Modern Greek as free elements (with a few exceptions)- are extremely productive when attaching to verbal or nominal stems (i.e., nominalizations). Our basic issue, in the present study, is that these prepositions function as lexically attached prefixes in the sense that (a) they follow lexical word-formation processes, i.e., word-formation rules (WFRs), (b) they are semantically noncompositional, and (c) the verbal or nominal stems when combined with them become lexically derived composites. For example, the archaic prepositions apo, ek, en, pro, ana, meta, epi and hypo, all prefix to a stem such as trop- <verb stem trep- "to turn", nominal stem trop- "the act or result of turning", etc., to produce semantically unrelated forms such as: apotropi "aversion", ektropi "change of course", entropi "shame", protropi "urge", anatropi "upset, overthrow", metatropi "change", epitropi "committee" and hypotropi "relapse