On the locative meaning of the verb ‘to be’ in early Greek philosophy. A typological perspective

Abstract

This paper investigates on the syntactic and semantic continuity between the lexical and the copulative uses of the verb εἰμί in ancient Greek. Kahn (2003[1973]) challenged the traditional view according to which the lexical meaning of the verb is more ancient than its copulative use (Meillet 1908). In particular, he was against the hypothesis of a primitive locative meaning of the original Indo-European root *h1es-, since there would be no diachronic development that explains the diversity of usage from an original word with a spatial meaning. The main function of εἰμί would be primarily syntactic, as a mark of ‘sentencehood’ used to distinguish between a simple NP and a sentence. However, if the problem is tackled from a typological perspective, it turns out that many languages of the world typically exhibit the ‘demonstrative-to-copula’ path (Diessel 1999), a grammaticalization process that originates from the ‘topic mechanism’ (Li & Thompson 1977). After considering a similar diachronic path for *h1es-, I will hypothesize a common deictic predicative source for both its verbal and nominal uses (cf. Stassen 1997; Dixon 2003; Killian 2022). I will then analyse the distribution of εἰμί in a sample of early Greek philosophical texts to determine the role of the locative meaning in the foundation of being.