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Verbal alternations in Ancient Greek as an interface between lexicon and syntax

From the book Ancient Greek Linguistics

  • Jesús de la Villa

Abstract

This paper offers a first attempt to systematically describe verbal alternations in Ancient Greek. It is shown that some of the alternations present in Ancient Greek are also present in other languages, but that the coincidence is not total, because some Greek alternations have not been described for other languages. Additionally, given the regular presence of some alternations with certain lexical groups of verbs, it is argued that the possibility for certain verbs to be associated with alternating argument structures cannot be considered simply as an idiosyncratic characteristic of each verb. On the contrary, following a constructional model, the author proposes to recognize a grammatical component formed with all the argument possibilities in Greek; each verb, according to its semantic characteristics, could match with one or more of those possibilities. This would be part of the lexical-syntactic interface of this language.

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
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