On deictic motion verbs in Homeric Greek

Abstract

This paper investigates the basic motion verbs ‘go’ and ‘come’ in Homeric Greek. In particular, it aims to examinewhether the deictic component,which is usually ascribed to the inherent semantic meaning of these verbs cross–linguistically, has to be considered as a prototypical semantic property of εἶμι ‘go’ and βαίνω ‘step; go; come’. These latter can indeed take a deictic interpretation at a pragmatic, syntactic or discourse level, but I will show how the deictic component is not inherently associated with their lexical semantics. Data from the contexts of use of these verbs, in both narrative discourse and direct speech, strongly suggest that the original semantic opposition between ‘go’ and ‘come’ in early Homeric Greek was aspectual (Aktionsart) rather than deictic. At a lexical level, the two verbs show traces of a deictically–neutral meaning of ‘moving along a path’, with respect to which the telic verb βαίνω proves to be aspectually compatible with the entailment of arrival of the Figure to the Ground, whereas the atelic verb εἶμι does not contain it as an intrinsic part. Further evidence also comes from the archaic formulaic motion construction βῆ δ΄ἰέναι ‘went; set out to go’, which is used according to aspectual rather than deictic meaning inherited from its components.