“The importance of Goal in synchrony and diachrony: semantic and syntactic aspects of the
source-goal asymmetry in Homeric and Classical Greek”
Thanasis Georgakopoulos
Freie Universität Berlin – Excellence Cluster Topoi
[email protected]
Recent literature on spatial semantics has demonstrated that Goals and Sources behave
asymmetrically at both the linguistic and the non-linguistic level (see, among others, Ikegami
1987; Stefanowitsch and Rohde 2004; Lakusta and Landau 2005; Papafragou 2010; Kabata
2013). In most studies, this language asymmetry has a clear directionality, in the sense that a
clear preference for the endpoint of motion is reported. However, a growing body of research
has started to challenge the pervasiveness of Goal prevalence, showing that the manifestation
of the phenomenon is not ubiquitous across languages (see Kopecka and Narasimhan, eds.
2012). Thus, whether a particular language prefers Goals over other portions of the PATH
schema is an open empirical question, which needs to be tested. Using the Frame Semantics
approach to lexical meaning (Fillmore 1985; Fillmore et al. 2003), this paper takes up this
challenge by determining whether Ancient Greek exhibits balance or imbalance in the
representation of the Source and the Goal in motion events.
The data used in this investigation stem from a historical corpus constructed by myself
covering Homeric and Classical Greek. The corpus, extracted from the Perseus digital library
(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper), comprises 32 works from various text types and
contains approximately 550,000 words. The focus is mostly on the following verbs of
inherently directed motion: pheúgō (‘leave, flee, take flight, escape’), apérkhomai (‘go away,
depart’), aphiknéomai/ hiknéomai (‘reach’), and hikánō ‘reach’.
I first test the hypothesis that the specific frame each verb evokes influences the choice
of the spatial complement (cf. Stefanowitsch & Rohde 2004). I subsequently examine the
hypothesis that Source-oriented verbs (e.g., pheúgō) co-occurring with a spatial expression
that denotes the Goal (e.g., eis + acc.) are more frequent than Goal-oriented verbs (e.g.,
hikánō) co-occurring with a spatial expression that denotes the Source (e.g. ek + gen.). This
hypothesis is formulated on the assumption that an equal basis of comparison is ensured
when a sentence contains both the Goal and the Source.
I further detect instances whereby a Goal marker stands in the place of a Source marker,
which one would expect under the Goal-over-Source-predominance hypothesis (see Ikegami
1987). Consider, for instance, the use of the accusative (a marker that can be found in Goal
relations) with verbs associated with the concepts of ‘removing’ or ‘depriving’, although the
verbs belonging in this semantic field “require” a complement with an ablative value:
hōs ém’
aphaireîtai
as
take.away:3SG.M/P Chryseis:ACC.SG
1SG.ACC
Khrusēída
Phoîbos
Apóllōn
Phoebus:NOM.SG Apollo:NOM.SG
‘As Phoebus Apollo takes from me the daughter of Chryses’ (Homer, Il. 1.182)
I finally deal with the diachronic mergers of Goal—Place and Source—Place, focusing
mainly on deictic and local adverbs (cf. Mackenzie 1978). The Greek data indicate that Goal
and Place markers often share the same form, whereas Source is being kept distinct. It should
be kept in mind that in Ancient Greek we encounter many cases of Source-to-Place transfers
(see Mackenzie 1978; Nikitina and Spano 2014). However, what is relevant to the question of
the Source-Goal asymmetry is the fact that Source-Place polysemy tends to be avoided
(Luraghi and Nikitina 2015). A clear asymmetry between Sources and Goals is evident in the
way Source and Goal markers interact with Place markers with regard to the directionality of
change. Place markers can only extend to encode Goal, not Source.
References
Fillmore, J. Charles. 1982. Frame Semantics. In The Linguistic Society of Korea (eds.),
Linguistics in the Morning Calm, 111–137. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company.
Fillmore, J. Charles, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Josef Ruppenhofer & Abby Wright. 2003.
Framenet in action: The case of attaching. International Journal of Lexicography 16.
297–332.
Ikegami, Yoshihiko. 1987. ‘Source’ vs. ‘goal’: A case of linguistic dissymmetry. In Dirven,
René & Günter Radden (eds.), Concepts of Case, 122–146. Tübingen: Narr.
Kabata, Kaori. 2013. Goal–source asymmetry and crosslinguistic grammaticalization
patterns: a cognitive-typological approach. Language Sciences 36, 78–89.
Kopecka, Anetta & Bhuvana Narasimhan (eds.). 2012. Events of Putting and Taking. A
Crosslinguistic Perspective. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Lakusta, M. Laura & Barbara Landau. 2005. Starting at the end: The importance of goals in
spatial language. Cognition 96, 1–33.
Luraghi, Silvia, Tatiana Nikitina & Chiara Zanchi. 2015. Space in diachrony: asymmetries in
the space domain and their developments. Workshop in the 22nd International
Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015.
Mackenzie, J. Lachlan. 1978. Ablative-locative transfers and their relevance for the theory of
case-grammar. Journal of Linguistics 14, 129–375.
Nikitina, Tatiana & Marianna Spano. 2014. 'Behind' and 'in front' in Ancient Greek: A case
study in orientation asymmetry. In Kutscher Silvia & Daniel Werning (eds), On Ancient
Grammars of Space, 67-82. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Papafragou, Anna. 2010. Source-Goal asymmetries in motion representation: Implications for
language production and comprehension. Cognitive Science 34. 1064–1092.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Ada Rohde. 2004. The goal bias in the encoding of motion events.
In Radden, Günter & Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds.), Studies in linguistic motivation, 249–
268. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.