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BetweenBetween semanticssemantics and and syntaxsyntax::spatialspatial verbsverbs and and prepositionsprepositions
in Latinin Latin
Linda Meini and Barbara McGillivrayUniversity of Pisa, Department of Linguistics
Pisa, Space in Language, October 9 2009
State of the ArtState of the Art
Latin preverbs: spatial values vs. actionality
(Lehmann, Haverling, Romagno, García-Hernandez, Bertocci)
ATELIC TELICfacio
I make/doperficioI achieve
moliorI labor
emoliorI accomplish
laboroI strive for
elaboroI achieve (with effort)
TraditionalTraditional ReconstructionReconstruction
Latin preverbs and adpositions
P.I.E.ADV/ADP/
PREV
ek dè Chrysēìs nēòs bê pontopóroio (Il. A, 439)
1. ‘Chryseis came out from the sea-crosser ship’2. ‘Chryseis disembarked from the sea-crosser ship’
• local or temporal notions• free movement in the sentence• undifferentiated functions
Traditional ReconstructionTraditional Reconstruction
Basic structure: NP + X + V*flumen ad eo ‘I go to the river’
preverbs NP + [X + V]flumen adeo
postpositions [NP + X] + V• adverbial accompaniment to reinforcethe information given by the cases
• govern the noun by specifying its case
prepositions [X + NP]PP + Vad flumen eo
An An ‘‘all but clear evolutionall but clear evolution’’
“We may thus hypothesize a fluid situation, where adpositions from different sources evolve at different rates and where each kind ‘grammaticalizes on its own, following
its own diachronic trajectory that may or may not be determined by clausal (OV vs. VO) syntax’ (Givón).”
“The evolution is actually all but linear … Basically, the overall picture of Latin where protracted and overlapping transitional
stages generate internal and typological inconsistencies is due to the coexistence and mixing of different patterns, and to the
different rate at which old structure disappear.”(Magni, 2008)
Relics of Adpositions FreedomRelics of Adpositions Freedom
Festo: sub vos placo (= supplico vos) ‘I implore you’
Plautus: distraxissent disque tulissent ‘they would have tornme in pieces and rent me asunder’
loca haec circiter excidit mi ‘I dropped it about this spot’
Cicero: contraque legem ‘and against the law’
Caesar: quos inter controversia esset ‘those between whom thedispute was’
Pliny: Gades usque pervectum ‘after sailing as far as Gades’
fixed expressions: mecum, tecum ... ‘with me, with you ...’quoad ‘as far as’quocirca ‘wherefore’
‘‘GrammaticalGrammatical PeculiaritiesPeculiarities’’
1) Complements coding spatial relations:
• local complements expressed by simple cases:° names of city or small island, domus ‘home’, rus ‘country’
• static location coded by ablative:° locus ‘place’, pars ‘part’, litus ‘shore’, … medius ‘in the
middle’, imus ‘the lowest’, summus ‘highest’
• lative accusative in some fixed expression:° ire malam crucem ‘to go to hell’, exsequias ire ‘to go to a
funeral’, alicui suppetias ire ‘to go help someone’, infitias ire ‘to deny’
‘‘GrammaticalGrammatical PeculiaritiesPeculiarities’’
2) Local complements with some prefixed verbs of motion:
• simple cases • prepositional phrases
exercitum Ligerim traducit (Caes.)‘he leads the army over the Loire’
vexillum trans vallum traiecit (Liv.)‘he threw the sign over the trench’
castris egressi (Caes.)‘after leaving the camp’
e castris Helvetiorum egressi (Caes.)‘after leaving the Helvetians’ camp’
muro turribusque deiecti (Caes.)‘after being thrown down the city
wall and the towers’
de muro se deiecerunt (Caes.)‘they threw themselves down the
city wall’
Goals of this studyGoals of this study
All these relics belong to the spatial language:1) to verify the strength of spatial semantics in keeping
archaic structures° we will analyze local complements with no spatialpreposition occurring with prefixed verbs of motion/rest
° hypothesis: decrease in frequency • diachronically: in texts of late Latin• synchronically: in texts with hints of spoken Latin
in poetry
2) to verify how computational methods used to process modern languages can be fruitfully applied to the study of a dead language as Latin
CorpusCorpus--based analysisbased analysis
Syntactically annotated corporaSyntactically annotated corpora
1. Latin Dependency Treebank(Bamman-Crane, 2006) >53000 words
2. Index Thomisticus Treebank(Passarotti-Busa, 2007) >54000 words
• Cicero • Caesar • Sallust • Vergil• Propertius• Ovid • Petronius • Jerome • Thomas Aquinas
Verb selectionVerb selection
preverbs with “spatial” meaning
ab ad ante circum de ex in inter
intra per prae pro sub trans
verbs of motion and rest that allow a local complement without preposition
argument structure: valency lexicons automatically extracted from the treebanks (McGillivray and Passarotti)
Syntactic alternationSyntactic alternation
1) NP: case required by the preverbexercitum Ligerim traducit trans+acc
‘he leads his army over the Loire’ (Caes.)
preposition.ABSENT
2) PP: preposition = preverb inter me atque te murus intersit‘there is a wall between me and you’ (Cic.)
preposition.PRESENT
Syntactic alternation (2)Syntactic alternation (2)
1) NP: the case required by the preverb
preposition.ABSENT• no transitive verbs where the object is the
goal of the movement
2) PP: preposition = preverb
preposition.PRESENT• no names of cities, small islands, domus,
locus
FrequenciesFrequencies
author preposition. ABSENT preposition.PRESENT
Cicero 4 9Caesar 3 4Sallust 7 12Vergil 5 0Propertius 9 2Ovid 2 0Petronius 11 20Jerome 2 9Thomas 5 42
Test of independence
• author and preposition are not independent (p<0.01)• medium-sized association
ConclusionsConclusions
ConclusionsConclusions
1) Computational methods
• Small size of accessible corpora affected ourstudy about a marginal phenomenon
prose writers: Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Petronius
• Great advantage: computational and statisticalanalyses in short time
• Outcomes showing a clear general trend, consistent with our previous hypothesis
ConclusionsConclusions
2) Linguistic results
• The construction preposition.ABSENT issignificantly:
° less frequent diachronically in late Latin authors,anticipating Romance outcomes
° more frequent synchronically in poets, who makeuse of archaisms and precious language
• No claims about texts with hints of spokenLatin < low frequencies for Petronius
ConclusionsConclusions
• Local complements can be encoded without spatial prepositions even when prepositions are obligatory:° Lat.: domum eo, domi sum° Eng.: I go home, I am home° It. L2: learners (even advanced) skip more
frequently spatial prepositions (Bernini, Meini)
• accuracy of the “distributed spatial semantics”theory (Sinha and Kuteva)
• spatial domain is basic → languages can use lesslinguistic material
ReferencesReferences
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Lehmann, C. (1983), Latin preverbs and cases, in Pinkster, H. (ed.), Latin Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamins .
Magni, E. (2008), The Evolution of Latin Word (Dis)order, in Scalise, S. et al. (eds.), Universals of Language Today, New York, Springer.
McGillivray, B. and Passarotti, M. (2009), The Development of the Index ThomisticusTreebank Valency Lexicon, Proceedings of the LaTeCH-SHELT&R.
Meini, L. (2009), Dimensioni dello spazio nelle preposizioni. Uno studio empirico sull’italiano L2, Pisa, PLUS: Pisa University Press.
Passarotti, M. and Busa, R. (2007), Una Dependency Treebank come proposta per l’IndexThomisticus, XII International Congress of the Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e Storia delle Idee, Roma.
Romagno, D. (2003), Azionalità e transitività: il caso dei preverbi latini, «AGI» 88, 2.Sinha, C. and Kuteva, T. (1995), Distributed Spatial Semantic, «Nordic Journal of Linguistics» 18.