DOI:10.30842/alp2306573716205
Yeloyeva F. A., Kisiliyer M. L. Predlog
απο s nominativom v novogrecheskom yazyke: ob odnoy osobennosti
padezhnogo upravleniya. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana.
2020. XVI(2): 102–126.
Από is one of the main Greek prepositions which can be combined
with several cases: the genitive since antiquity and the accusative
as of the 11th–12th centuries and onwards. In
the 20th century the accusative became the main and the
most frequent case after από. In Modern Greek, however, από can be
also found with the nominative case. This contribution compares
different combinations of από with the nominative against those
with the accusative. The majority of our examples and all the
quantitative data come from the Corpus of Modern Greek
(http://web-corpora.net/GreekCorpus/search/?interface_language=en)
with approximately 35.7 million tokens; some problematic cases have
been checked with 15 native speakers of Modern Greek.
Our analysis reveals some semantic and formal differences
between “από + nominative” and “από + any other case (primarily
accusative)” constructions. Thus, από may be followed by the
nominative without an article or with the indefinite article, while
NPs with the accusative can also take the definite article, with
combinations with the accusative more frequent than those with the
nominative. Sometimes (though quite rarely), both can have the same
meaning where από with the accusative may have more bookish
colouring.
Our analysis of the syntactic peculiarities of “από +
nominative” made it possible to regard the usage of nominative as a
kind of agreement with the subject. It also shows that in certain
combinations with the nominative the preposition από can serve as a
distinctive marker of different syntactic ranks in phrases such as
από γιος έγινε πατέρας ‘[he] became the father of a son’ to avoid
any potential ambiguity.
Unfortunately, this paper has left some problems un solved; for
example, the origin of the combination “από + nominative” remains
unclear. It is undoubtedly a result of the reanalysis of one or
even several ellyptical constructions. In the future, it would be
interesting to look for parallels in other Balkan languages in a
comparative study.
Keywords
Modern Greek, case government, Modern Greek
prepositions, corpus linguistics, Corpus of Modern Greek, semantics
of prepositions, syntax, arguments
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