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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