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 →
This is another question that was asked online (this time New Testament Greek Club) that would be difficult to answer without treebanks. Can a phrase with an adjective in second attributive position be broken up by a genitive? Luke 23:35 reads: εἰ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ χριστὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ὁ ἐκλεκτός. Can this be, "if he is... 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 →
The question was asked on Facebook about what principles might motivate the occurrence of indefinite noun phrases to take prepositional phrases. It's a good question. Prepositions phrases tend be restrictive when they occur in noun phrases just like other NP modifiers. But they certainly can still be descriptive, too. I ran a quick and dirty... Continue Reading →