Lexical aspect and morphosyntactic cohesion between motion verbs and spatial particles in Homeric Greek

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate a rather neglected topic in motion event studies, i.e. the role that lexical aspect (i.e. Aktionsart) plays in motion event encoding in Homeric Greek. Building on the theoretical framework of Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000, 2009), this work focuses on the role that telicity (Vendler 1967), as a verb-inherent semantic feature, plays in the distribution of motion verbs and co-occurring spatial particles as well as in their different mutual morphosyntactic cohesion. The textual analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey shows a non-random distribution of motion verbs and spatial particles with their own semantic value, in particular a stronger morphosyntactic cohesion is found between telic verbs and goal-oriented particles, due to their mutual semantic compatibility.