"Adpositions are used, universally, to mark the roles of nominal participants in the verbal clause most commonly indirect object roles. Practically all languages seem to have such markers which begin their diachronic life as lexical words -- in this case either serial verbs or positional nouns. In many languages, however, adpositions also seem to have extended their diachronic life one step further, becoming verbal affixes. The main focus of this book is the tail-end of the diachronic life cycle of adpositions. That is, the process by which, having arisen first as nominal-attached prepositions or post-positions, they wind up attaching themselves to verbs. Our core puzzle is thus fairly transparent: How and why should morphemes that pertain functionally to nominals, and begin their diachronic life-cycle as nominal grammatical operators, wind up as verbal morphology? While the core five chapters of this book focus on the rise of verb-attached prepositions in Homeric Greek, its theoretical perspective is broader, perched at the intersection of three closely intertwined core components of the study of human language: (a) the communicative function of grammar; (b) the balance between universality and cross-language diversity of grammars; and (c) the diachrony of grammatical constructions, how they mutate over time.While paying well-deserved homage to the traditional Classical scholarship, this study is firmly wedded to the assumption, indeed presupposition, that Homeric Greek is just another natural language, spoken before written, designed as an instrument of communication, and subject to the same universal constraints as all human languages. And further, that those constraints--so-called language universals--express themselves most conspicuously in diachronic change. In analyzing the synchronic variation and text distribution of prepositional constructions in Homeric Greek, this study relies primarily on the theory-laden method of Internal Reconstruction"--.

• The Life Cycle of Adpositions
• Title page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1. How do nominal case-markers become verbal affixes?
  • 1.1 The functional-syntactic domain of adpositions
  • 1.2 Locus of cliticization
  • 1.3 Verb-attached adpositions
  • 1.4 The typological-diachronic conundrum
  • 1.5 Steps toward a diachrony
    • 1.5.1 Overview
    • 1.5.2 Post-verbal prepositions in English
    • 1.5.3 Post-verbal incorporation of prepositions in KinyaRwanda: Promotion to DO
    • 1.5.4 Pre-verbal incorporation of post-positions in Rama
  • 1.6 Discussion
  • Abbreviations of grammatical terms
• Chapter 2. Diachronic baseline:: Pre-nominal prepositions in Homeric Greek
  • 2.1 Introduction
  • 2.2 Phonological and grammatical transciption: Caveats and apologia
  • 2.3 Homeric text
  • 2.4 Pre-nominal prepositions in the Homeric text
    • 2.4.1 Preamble
    • 2.4.2 Examples of the use of individual pre-nominal prepositions
      • a. ana- ‘up’, ‘upward’
      • b. kata- ‘down’, ‘downward’
      • c. en(i)- ‘in’, ‘inside’, extended to ‘at’
      • d. ex-/ ek- ‘out(of)’, ‘from’, extended to agentive ‘by’
      • e. eis-, es-, ei- ‘to’
      • f. apo- ‘from’, ‘away from’
      • g. epi- ‘on’, ‘upon’, ‘over’
      • h. peri- ‘over’, ‘above’, ‘about’, ‘around’
      • i. para- ‘by’, ‘next to’, ‘near’
      • j. pro(s)- ‘in front of’, ‘before’, ‘toward’, ‘to’, extended to ‘through/by/with’
      • k. dia- ‘through’
      • l. meta- ‘with’, ‘among’, ‘about’
      • m. sun- ‘with’ (associative)
      • n. ama- ‘with’
      • o. amfi(s)- ‘about’, ‘around’, ‘near’, extended to ‘with’
      • p. hupo- ‘under’, extended to agentive ‘by’
      • q. huper- ‘above’, ‘over’
      • r. anti(os)- ‘against’, ‘facing’, ‘across from’
  • 2.5 Quantitative text distribution
    • 2.5.1 Functional-syntactic distribution of pre-nominal preposition
      • a. Pre-nominal prepositions used with intransitive verbs with an obligatory indirect object (either concrete or abstract)
      • b. Prenominal prepositions used with di-transitive verbs with an obligatory indirect object (either concrete or abstract)
      • c. Pre-nominal prepositions used with optional indirect objects regardless of verb-type
    • 2.5.2 Pre-verbal (OV) vs. post-verbal (VO) prepositional phrases
    • 2.5.3 Text frequency of nominal-attached vs. verb-attached prepositions
  • 2.6 Summary
  • Abbreviations of grammatical terms
  • Appendix 1. Text locations of pre-nominal preposition (Books I, II of Iliad)
  • Appendix 1. Text locations of pre-nominal preposition (Books I, II of Iliad)
  • Appendix 2. Text locations for pre-nominal preposition, combined (Books I, II of Iliad)
  • Appendix 3. Text locations for the functional-syntactic distribution of preposition-marked indirect objects (Text: Iliad, book I)
• Chapter 3. Diachronic target:: Pre-verbal prepositions in Homeric Greek
  • 3.1 Preamble
  • 3.2 Functional-syntactic categories
  • 3.3 Quantitative text-distribution
    • 3.3.1 Text distribution of pre-nominal vs. pre-verbal prepositions
    • 3.3.2 Text distribution of the semantic/syntactic types of pre-verbal prepositions
  • 3.4 Interim summary
  • Abbreviations of grammatical terms
  • Appendix 1.
  • Appendix 2.
• Chapter 4. Detached (‘severed’) prepositions in Homeric Greek
  • 4.1 Recapitulation
  • 4.2 Detached prepositions: A preliminary survey
  • 4.3 Pre-verbal vs. post-verbal detached prepositions
  • 4.4 Quantitative text distribution of functional-syntactic patterns of detached prepositions
  • 4.5 Detached prepositions and second-position ‘particles’
  • 4.6 Overall functional load of the various prepositional constructions
  • 4.7 Discussion
  • Abbreviations of grammatical terms
  • Appendix 1. Text locatons of detached prepositions (Text: Iliad, books I, II, III, IV, V, VI)
  • Appendix 1. Text locatons of detached prepositions (Text: Iliad, books I, II, III, IV, V, VI)
  • Appendix 2. Text locations of pre-verbal (OV) vs. post-verbal (VO) detached prepositions (Text: Book I of Iliad)
  • Appendix 3. Text locations of functionalsyntactic classes of detached prepositions (Text: Iliad, books I, II)
• Chapter 5. The pre-verbal ‘Augment’ e- in Homeric Greek as an earlier cycle of pre-verbal prepositions
  • 5.1 Introduction
  • 5.2 Clausal/verbal contexts for the use of the pre-verbal ‘augment’ e-
    • 5.2.1 Intransitive verbs with an indirect object
      • 5.2.1.1 Overtly present indirect object
      • 5.2.1.2 Indirect object zeroed-out in anaphoric or generic context
    • 5.2.2 Bi-transitive transfer verbs
      • 5.2.2.1 Overtly expressed indirect object
      • 5.2.2.2 Zeroed-out indirect object
    • 5.2.3 The residue
  • 5.3 Discussion
  • Abbreviations of grammatical terms
  • Appendix 1. Text loci of verbs prefixed the ‘augment’ e- prefix (Books I,II,III,IV,V,IV of Iliad)
• Chapter 6. The pre-verbal ‘Augment’ e- in Homeric Greek when preceded by prepositions
  • 6.1 Introduction
  • 6.2 Functional-syntactic context
    • 6.2.1 Intransitive verbal clause with indirect objects
      • 6.2.1.1 Concrete location or motion verbs
      • 6.2.1.2 Intransitive verbs with more abstract indirect objects
    • 6.2.2 Bi-transitive verbs
    • 6.2.3 The residue
  • 6.3 Quantitative text distribution
  • 6.4 Discussion
  • Abbreviations of grammatical terms
  • Appendix 1. Text loci of verbs prefixes by preposition(s) plus e- (Books I,II,III,IV,V,VI of Iliad)
• Chapter 7. Mirror image:: How English prepositions became post-verbal clitics
  • 7.1 Introduction
  • 7.2 Chaucer (1340–1400)
  • 7.3 Malory (1410–1471)
  • 7.4 Shakespeare
  • 7.5 Twentieth Century English
    • 7.5.1 Mid-Twentieth-Century fiction: Elmore Leonard
    • 7.5.2 Oral narrative
    • 7.5.3 Functional categories of post-verbal prepositions in spoken English
  • 7.6 Discussion
  • 7.7 Closure
• Bibliography
• General index
• Language index