On syntactic diagnostics as tests for telicity in ancient Indo-European languages. Evidence from Vedic and Greek

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to assay the reliability of completive and durative adverbials as linguistic tests for telicity in a historical perspective. Until now such tests have been applied only to contemporary languages, which provide both written and spoken corpora. However, if the compatibility with for/in-adverbials is a reliable test, it should function not only crosslinguistically, but also with ancient and reconstructed languages. I will use digital corpora of Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek texts to explore the compatibility of temporal expressions with a selected sample of verbs that derive from a previous Indo-European common stage.