Latin constructions of the type magna cum laude "with great praise" have traditionally been equated structurally and historically with univerbated phrases of the type mecum "with me" and further with postpositional constructions in Sabellic like Umbrian nertru-co persi "at the left foot." Moreover, all three have been adduced as archaic survivals of postpositional syntax in Italic. A detailed investigation of both the synchrony and diachrony of these constructions, however, reveals that these conclusions are for the most part incorrect and that (...) our historical account of the evolution of adpositional syntax in both branches of Italic must be revised. (shrink)

The present paper deals with the semantics of locative expressions. Our approach is essentially model-theoretic, using basic geometrical properties of the space-time continuum. We shall demonstrate that locatives consist of two layers: the first layer defines a location and the second a type of movement with respect to that location. The elements defining these layers, called localisersand modalisers, tend to form a unit, which is typically either an adposition or a case marker. It will be seen that this layering is (...) not only semantically but in many languages also morphologically manifest. There are numerous languages in which the morphology is sufficiently transparent with respect to the layering. The consequences of this theory are manifold. For example, we shall show that it explains the contrast between English and Finnish concerning directionals, which is discussed in Fong (1997). In addition, we shall be concerned with the question of orientation of locatives, as discussed in Nam (1995). We propose that nondirectional locatives are oriented to the event, while directional locatives are oriented to certain arguments, called movers. (shrink)

Languages differ systematically in how they map path and manner of motion onto lexical and grammatical structures (Talmy, 1985). Manner languages (e.g., English, German and Russian) typically code manner in the verb (cf. English skip, run, hop, jog), and path in a variety of other devices such as particles (out), adpositions (into the room), verb affixes, etc. Path languages (e.g., Modern Greek, Romance, Turkish, Japanese and Hebrew) typically code path in the verb (cf. Greek vjeno ‘exit’, beno ‘enter’, ftano (...) ‘reach’, aneveno ‘ascend’, diashizo ‘cross’), and manner in adverbials (trexontas ‘running’, me ta podia ‘on foot’, jrigora ‘quickly’). The distinction is not meant to imply that the relevant languages lack certain kids of verb altogether. For instance, English has path verbs, such as enter, exit, ascend and descend, and Greek has manner verbs, such as treho ‘run’, kilao.. (shrink)