Abstract :
[en] One line of research in constructional analysis has supported (on occasion controversially – cf. Boas 2005; Goldberg & Jackendoff 2005) an upgraded role for lexical constructions headed by verbs, since verb senses are often associated with idiosyncratic properties that are not derivable from their interaction with grammatical constructions (e.g., Croft 2003; Boas 2008, 2013; Nemoto 2005). As per Boas (2013: 191), “individual verb senses should be regarded as mini-constructions with their own frame-semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic specifications whenever abstract meaningful constructions overgenerate”. Such approaches descriptively tally with a long line of earlier (e.g., Atkins 1987; Fillmore & Atkins 1992; Hanks 1996) and more recent work (e.g., Gries 2006; Berez & Gries 2008; Jansegers & Gries 2017; Hilpert 2008, 2016), which takes verbal polysemy as inhering in, and correlating with, all kinds of syntactic, morphological, and lexico-semantic features.
In the present work, we provide further evidence for enriched lexical constructions and their indispensability in describing the polysemy of one of the basic motion verbs in Ancient Greek, the verb baínō, whose most general gloss is ‘go’, characterized as denoting self-propelled, goal-directed movement (Napoli 2006; Nikitina 2013). Drawing on the behavioral profile approach adopted in several of the works above, we retrieved all instances of the verb (total of 579 tokens) in three authors (Homer, Euripides, Plato), each representing a different genre and era (8th c. BCE–4th c. BCE). The data were extracted from the Perseus digital library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/; last access April 2017) and each occurrence was annotated manually for features like sentence type, subject animacy, syntactic (e.g., prepositional phrase, infinitive, participle, zero) and semantic (e.g., source, goal, path) type of complement, lexical fillers of the complement slot, transitivity (since baínō also has transitive uses), verb inflection (showing tense-aspect and person-number), word order (of verb and complement) and discourse type (e.g., narrative, direct speech, chorus – a parameter that does not feature in earlier works). We then created separate pivot tables that allow us to automatically sort and display the data in a multidimensional chart, and most importantly to extract significant patterns.
Results clearly show that particular senses of baínō are attracted to particular morpho-syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic features. We suggest that such constellations should be analyzed as distinct lexical constructions, since the idiosyncratic features do not follow from more abstract grammatical constructions or from verbal semantics. We find, for instance, that particular senses may correlate exclusively with perfective aspect (e.g., the inchoative construction), or with a specific person-number inflection, or with a particular type of complement, or with very specific lexical fillers (as in the sense ‘mount’, which mainly co-occurs with the nouns naûs ‘ship’ and díphros ‘stool’), or with particular discourse contexts (in fact, some of these lexico-grammatical combinations seem to function as formulaic markers correlating with particular text-types and contexts). Importantly, more than one of these constraints (conventionalizations) may co-exist in the same sense, strongly arguing for enriched gestalts of morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic features that are necessary for an adequate account of the verb’s polysemy and distribution.
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