Between semantics and syntax:
spatial verbs and prepositions
in Latin
Linda Meini and Barbara McGillivray
University of Pisa, Department of Linguistics
Pisa, Space in Language, October 9 2009
State of the Art
Latin preverbs: spatial values vs. actionality
ATELIC
TELIC
facio
perficio
I make/do
I achieve
molior
emolior
I labor
I accomplish
laboro
elaboro
I strive for
I achieve (with effort)
(Lehmann, Haverling, Romagno, García-Hernandez, Bertocci)
Traditional Reconstruction
Latin
preverbs and
adpositions
P.I.E.
ADV/ADP/
PREV
• local or temporal notions
• free movement in the sentence
• undifferentiated functions
ek dè Chrysēìs nēòs bê pontopóroio
1. ‘Chryseis came out from the sea-crosser ship’
2. ‘Chryseis disembarked from the sea-crosser ship’
(Il. A, 439)
Traditional 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 reinforce
the information given by the cases
• govern the noun by specifying its case
prepositions [X + NP]PP + V
ad flumen eo
An ‘all 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 Freedom
Festo: sub vos placo (= supplico vos) ‘I implore you’
Plautus: distraxissent disque tulissent ‘they would have torn
me 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 the
dispute 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’
‘Grammatical Peculiarities’
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’
‘Grammatical Peculiarities’
2) Local complements with some prefixed verbs
of motion:
• simple cases
• prepositional phrases
exercitum Ligerim traducit (Caes.)
vexillum trans vallum traiecit (Liv.)
‘he leads the army over the Loire’
‘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.)
de muro se deiecerunt (Caes.)
‘after being thrown down the city
wall and the towers’
‘they threw themselves down the
city wall’
Goals 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 spatial
preposition 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
Corpus-based analysis
Syntactically annotated corpora
1.
Latin Dependency Treebank
2.
Index Thomisticus Treebank
(Bamman-Crane, 2006) >53000 words
(Passarotti-Busa, 2007) >54000 words
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Cicero
Caesar
Sallust
Vergil
Propertius
Ovid
Petronius
Jerome
Thomas Aquinas
Verb selection
y
preverbs with “spatial” meaning
ab ad ante circum de ex in inter
intra per prae pro sub trans
y
verbs of motion and rest that allow a local
complement without preposition
y
argument structure: valency lexicons
automatically extracted from the treebanks
(McGillivray and Passarotti)
Syntactic alternation
1) NP: case required by the preverb
exercitum 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)
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
Frequencies
author
Cicero
Caesar
Sallust
Vergil
Propertius
Ovid
Petronius
Jerome
Thomas
preposition. ABSENT preposition.PRESENT
4
3
7
5
9
2
11
2
5
9
4
12
0
2
0
20
9
42
Test of independence
•
•
author and preposition are not independent (p<0.01)
medium-sized association
Conclusions
Conclusions
1) Computational methods
• Small size of accessible corpora affected our
study about a marginal phenomenon
prose writers: Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Petronius
• Great advantage: computational and statistical
analyses in short time
• Outcomes showing a clear general trend,
consistent with our previous hypothesis
Conclusions
2) Linguistic results
• The construction preposition.ABSENT is
significantly:
° less frequent diachronically in late Latin authors,
anticipating Romance outcomes
° more frequent synchronically in poets, who make
use of archaisms and precious language
• No claims about texts with hints of spoken
Latin < low frequencies for Petronius
Conclusions
• 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 less
linguistic material
References
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