Sulla codifica degli eventi di moto in greco omerico: il ruolo dell'aspetto lessicale

This paper aims at investigating the encoding strategy of motion events in Homeric Greek. Based on Talmy’s theoretical framework (1985; 2000; 2007; 2009), this study focuses on a rather neglected topic on motion events description, i.e. the role of verbal inherent lexical aspect (Aktionsart). The analysis takes into account the occurrences of the verbs for run in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In particular, the verbs θέω, τρέχω, ἔδραμον show a non-random distribution with the co-occurring spatial particles as PATH-satellites. Textual data suggest that the [±telic] aspectual feature plays a fundamental role for both the entailment of the arrival of the FIGURE (the moving object) to the GROUND (the reference object), and the level of morphosyntactic cohesion between motion verbs and spatial particles, according to different degrees of grammaticalization.