Dimensions of Possession - elchacocomoarealinguistica

138 Lars Heltoftconceivable answers to this. One strategy would be to view Classical Greek assynchronically locative-based; referring again to the networks employed inHeine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer (1991), the locative would then be interpretedas a focal member of such a network. Following the alternative strategy wouldmean taking the extant locatives to be just remnants of a former system thathas at the stage of Classical Greek almost changed into an abstract framingsystem. This issue is for experts of Greek, but one possible outcome would bethat Homeric Greek still reflects a locative based system, whereas later stages,especially Attic prose, do not.Luraghi (1991) accounts for the mergers of Greek in terms of combinationwith noun classes, much along the same lines as the distinction betweenanthropocentric case and inanimate cases quoted from Heine, Claudi andHünnemeyer. Plain inflectional datives with human NPs must be interpretedas the semantic roles of Receptive and Comitative, whereas non-human andinanimate NPs will require Instrument readings of a plain inflectional dative.To give a human NP the function as Instrument calls for an adposition; in thesame way, to give non-human NPs the Receptive function calls for anadposition. I quote two examples from Luraghi (1991:60–61), showing nonhumanReceptive and human Instrument readings:(39) Ho poimè:n ho kalòs tòn bíon parèchei hypèr tà próbata.the shepherd the good the life gives for the sheep‘The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep’(40) ’Autoì gár sphêis hoi Héllenes légontes di’ ’aggélô:n ho:s ...selves for they the Greeks saying through messengers that ...‘For the Greeks themselves said through messengers that ...’While this is a neat description of the functionality of a multipolysemousinflectional case system, there is no need to take the further step of distinguishingbetween two different dative paradigms, provided that a commoncore reading can be provided for the two sets, human and non-human datives.If one adopts something like the abstract frame reading of the dative, thedistribution of Instrument readings and Receptive readings over adpositionsand noun classes will reduce to a case of combinatorial variation, as inFigure 7.