Análisis del dativo en construcciones impersonales: los conceptos de sujeto y de semisujeto en griego antiguo

Abstract

Las construcciones impersonales con un complemento en dativo y otro en genitivo se documentan en griego en un número muy reducido de verbos que designan interés o necesidad. Aunque se trata de una construcción presente también en otras lenguas indoeuropeas antiguas, en griego se documenta a partir de fecha posthomérica. Las construcciones personales, más recientes en otras lenguas, se documentan en griego, sin embargo, ya desde Homero. El dativo de la construcción impersonal designa entidades humanas y, además, expresa el Experimentador y el tópico. Estas propiedades designativas, semánticas y pragmáticas, próximas a las del sujeto prototípico, permiten al dativo ciertos comportamientos sintácticos característicos del sujeto. Nos hallamos, pues, ante un semisujeto, es decir, ante un complemento verbal que, a pesar de su codificación gramatical, diferente de la del sujeto, presenta unas propiedades y unos comportamientos sintácticos próximos a los de este. El genitivo de la construcción impersonal objeto de estudio presenta también comporImpersonal constructions holding a complement both in dative and genitive are attested in Greek with a few verbs, which share the property of expressing the interests or the needs of human beings. These constructions, which occur in several ancient IndoEuropean languages, are documented in the postHomeric period in the case of Greek. In the opposite, personal constructions, which appear more recently in other languages, are already documented in Greek since Homer's times. The dative in the impersonal construction refers to human entities, codes the Experiencer and it is also the topic. These properties, which are close to those of the prototypical subject, seem to allow the dative to show some subject-like syntactic behaviour. In fact, we will argue that the dative in the impersonal construction behaves as a semi-subject, i. e. a verbal complement which, regardless of its coding, does have a set of properties that are typically associated with the subject in Greek. As well as the complement in dative, the complement in genitive in the impersonal construction exhibits a syntactic behaviour similar to

Non-nominative subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek

“…The partitive genitive, however, is an optional morphosyntactic device found with either subjects or objects (Luraghi 2003b: 60-62), as such being different in nature from potential non-nominative subjects which are lexically selected by the relevant predicates. In a later paper, however, Conti (2010) indeed discusses some subject properties of potential non-nominative subjects, in particular involving potential dative subjects in Ancient Greek. Our presentation below is partly based on Conti's discussion and partly on our own data (Danesi 2015;Barðdal 2017;Cattafi 2018), which have not figured so far in the published literature.…”

“…The remaining word orders exhibit approximately 4-12% of the total, with some internal variation between the three different nominative subject constructions, variation which may or may not be marginal. Exactly as with Latin, we know of one earlier study of word order for four Dat˗Gen verbs, carried out by Conti (2010). She analyzes the word order of 90 Ancient Greek examples of verbs of interest and finds that the order Dat˗Gen˗V makes up 27.8% of the tokens, while the order Dat˗V˗Gen makes up 23.4% of the tokens.…”

Reconstructing Syntactic Variation in Proto-Indo-European

“…They are still quite frequent in Icelandic (cf. Barðdal 2001) and in Irish (Noonan 2004), while they are residual in Vedic (Hock 1990) and in Ancient Greek (Conti 2010), for 7 It must be remarked that non-canonically marked forms such as me pudet and mihi placet have a different argument structure and therefore are not necessarily to be set on the same plane. Me pudet is impersonal, whereby the verb is fixed in the third person singular and has only one argument, which is coded by an oblique.…”