On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases: The Expression of Semantic Roles in Ancient Greek (review)

The majority of recent linguistic studies in prepositional semantics are synchronic. They use data from modern languages and are limited to a clarification of prepositional semantic roles. Therefore, it is gratifying to see that this research uses materials of an ancient language and not only describes semantic roles expressed by prepositions but also analyzes relationships between them and tries to define possible directions of prepositional semantic developments.

Luraghi’s orientation toward nonspecialists in the field of Ancient Greek is praiseworthy. A brief overview of the Ancient Greek literary tradition in the ‘Introduction’ (1–9) and an exhaustive summary of semantic roles in ‘Theoretical foundations’ (11–48) are helpful for both specialists in the field and newcomers. L explicitly supports a cognitive approach and follows it in the analysis of her data. Since prepositions and case systems are so closely connected, L discusses the meanings of Ancient Greek cases with and without prepositions (49–73).

In the subsection on recipient (39–40), L discusses a semantic extension of the dative case from recipient to source, using as an example German Er hat mir das Buch gegeben (‘He has given the book to me’)—Er hat mir das Buch weggenommen (‘He has taken the book away from me’). L holds that this extension is based on syntactic rather than on semantic properties of a noun phrase since the dative expresses source only with three-place predicates. This proposition does not seem probable if syncretism is taken into account (in Germanic languages the dative came to express the meanings of the ablative, locative, and instrumental). Furthermore, in the sentence cited above, the preverb weg- ‘away’ plays an important role in the meaning of this construction. Moreover, there are examples in Germanic where the dative expresses source without a three-place predicate (cf. Gothic ni fairra is ϸiudangardjai gudis ‘you are not far from the kingdom of God’ (Mark 12: 34)). Thus, the extension recipient–source has both semantic and morphological motivations.

The main part of this book (75–313) presents a separate semantic analysis of each Greek preposition. The individual discussions are structured in the same way. First, L gives the original meaning and, when this is possible, the etymology of a preposition. The peculiarities of usage are discussed next: whether it could be used as a preverb or a free adverb and what cases it takes as a preposition. L’s semantic analysis proceeds from concrete to abstract meanings defining types of semantic extensions and provides a mental map of a preposition when this is possible.

Every semantic role and its extensions are illustrated by examples from Ancient Greek texts. All examples are transliterated and are accompanied by glosses with lexical meaning and morphological information about every word in the sentence. Unfortunately, L often gives a rather loose translation that makes it difficult to see peculiarities of prepositional and nominal usage. For example, deimaínō hupèr huméōn is translated ‘I fear what may befall you’, obscuring the value of the prepositional phrase hupèr huméōn (221), and diaphérei gunḕ andròs tḕn phúsin is translated ‘there is a difference in nature between men and women’ rather than the more literal ‘a woman differs from a man as to [her] nature’ (58).

‘Conclusions’ (315–33) gives an outline of the most important results of this research, presenting the main tendencies of prepositional semantic development and summarizing case distribution and semantic extensions in prepositional phrases.

This book has significant value not only for specialists in Ancient Greek but also for general linguists, typologists, semanticists, and anyone who is interested in better understanding word meaning and human cognition.