Studies in Greek Language & Linguistics…
When we talk about prepositional meaning, we have focused on the usage of prepositions in constructional contexts. We have not talked about ἀπό or ἐκ meaning CAUSE, for example, but rather ἀπό and ἐκ being used in a CAUSE expressions. This is an important distinction.
The following is an essay encompassing the analysis and data that we will be presenting in our paper on ἐκ and ἀπό at the Greek Prepositions Workshop at Tyndale house in Cambridge this coming Friday, June 30th. It is a compilation of the short pieces that we have posted over the past week.
We find a strong “experiential correlation” (Tyler and Evans 2003, 32) between actions and the consequences that result from those actions (i.e. cause and effect): Causes are understood to precede their consequences. If one event immediately precedes another, it is only natural to conceive of the former as the cause and the latter as the effect.
Temporal constructions shift the landmark and the trajector source expressions out of the physical plane and reconceptualize them as events. The trajector is an event conceived as moving away from the landmark viewed as a temporal reference point. Fundamental to temporal expressions with ἐκ and ἀπό are distance and separation, which are then applied to the temporal plane.
Partitive constructions with ἐκ and ἀπό fall into two general types: entity partitives and set partitives.
Yesterday, we examined SOURCE expressions with ἐκ and ἀπό . Today, we are examining ORIGINS. The Greek Prepositions Workshop is next week. Following Luraghi (2003), we take origins as being an abstraction of the source. Prototypically, origins still involve a physical landmark and a physical trajector. There is no motion, however, only an “abstract notion of providence”... Continue Reading →
These are the usages most closely tied to our embodied experience in physical space. Prototypically source constructions also express motion, but this is not a requirement for the schema. καὶ ἀπῆρεν ἀπὸ Ἀντιοχίας, ἀπὸ πόλεως βασιλείας αὐτοῦ And he departed from Antioch, from the capital of his kingdom (1 Macc 11:49). Σπεῦσον καὶ ἔξελθε ἐν... Continue Reading →
Dahl (1985, 138; 2000, 9-10) describes to a hierarchy of usage for perfects across languages. The hierarchy lays out how a perfect is used in terms of its progress along the path of grammaticalization to being a simple past perfective form. An indefinite* time-point in the past < A time-point located by an overtly marked temporal... Continue Reading →
Both the Source (material) & Source (reflexive) senses involve an an element of identification of the TR with the LM.
