Case Attraction in Ancient Greek

Case attraction has stood as a puzzling, and elusive, oddity of older Indo-European languages. This paper focuses on attraction in Ancient Greek, establishing both the regularity of the operation and its underlying motivation. A novel method is proposed for grounding case in terms of a feature-based representation of agentivity properties, loosely based on Dowty’s proto-role theory, but reformulated in terms of privative opposition and hierarchically organized via a lattice. This structure is then used to model the case system of Ancient Greek and derive a hierarchical ordering on the case system in terms of agentivity. Modelling the interaction between this hierarchy and the other factors involved in case attraction in the Optimality Theory framework yields a full solution, predicting both its distribution and frequencies therein. The attempt to describe case as a stable, syntactic phenomenon is belied by instances of what is known as case conflict. This paper investigates a partic...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: TBILLC
• Authors: Scott Grimm
• Keywords: Ancient Greek, Case Attraction, Case Conflict, TBILLC 2005