DOI:10.30842/alp23065737172289326
Yakovleva A. V. Storony sveta v
drevnegrecheskom yazyke i sistemy prostranstvennoy oriyentatsii.
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 2021. 17(2):
289–326.
The paper presents the results of a corpus-based study of
Ancient Greek terms for cardinal points. Since cross-linguistically
the lexical sources of such terms are usually celestial bodies and
events or other landmarks used for large-scale spatial orientation,
the following research questions arise: can the original meaning of
a cardinal-point term (or its etymology) influence the strategies
of denoting spatial relations by cardinal points? If the original
meaning of a spatial term does have an impact on morphosyntactic
strategies, does it have anything to do with the genre of the text
or the preferred type of the spatial narrative (scientific vs
common-sense geography, cartographic vs hodological space
description)?
The morphosyntax of static location marking by cardinal
direction terms demonstrates a tendency for literal interpretation
of the terms used for designation of specific landmarks, while some
rare exceptions are also possible, especially in scientific
geographic texts of later periods. My hypothesis explains the
strong preference for these morphosyntactic strategies by the
influence of the hodological spatial narrative where spatial
relations are presented as routes toward a destination. This way of
space description and the lexical sources of the terms formed the
conventional strategies for marking static contexts with cardinal
directions. The absolute cardinal terms become cognitively salient
as abstract directions with the development of geography, when the
two-dimensional, cartographic way of describing large-scale spatial
relations gradually replaces hodological descriptions and thus
influences conventional spatial constructions.
Keywords
Ancient Greek, spatial relations, cardinal
directions, fictive motion, hodological narrative
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