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1.4. Brief methodological remarks

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This work is entirely based on inherently limited corpora: the texts that survived to the present, mainly owing to accidents of the textual tradition, are the only existing texts at linguists’ disposal. Cuzzolin & Haverling (2010: 25) addressed such varieties as “corpus languages”: “[they are] no longer anybody’s native language[s] and what we can know of [them] as […] living language[s] is to be traced in the written material still at our disposal.” Therefore, the picture of a particular language that such materials present is certain to be fragmentary. Joseph & Janda (2003: 19) effectively sum up the consequences of these issues as follows: “no matter how carefully we deal with documentary evidence from the past, we will always be left with lacunae in coverage, with a record that remains imperfect and so confronts us with major chasms in our understanding that must somehow be bridged.”

To begin with, a lack of attestation does not necessarily imply actual absence in the grammar or in the lexicon of a certain language (cf. Joseph & Janda 2003: 15ff. for some examples of “accidental gaps in the historical record”). Moreover, the textual tradition and the manuscript transmission of certain written sources can also be responsible for alterations or/and updating of the originals (cf. in particular Chapter 5). Thus, all above texts constitute instances of intrinsically diachronic corpora, in that they simultaneously attest to different chronological layers of a variety: on the one hand, texts at our disposal are the outcome of centuries of textual tradition; on the other hand, different sections of the same text can date back to different time periods (Sections 3.1–3.4).

All in all, as is discussed in Chapter 2 (see especially Section 2.2.3.3), grammaticalization theory is the most appropriate theoretical tool to deal with such inherently diachronic data: the developments that can be subsumed under the rubric of grammaticalization can be understood as gradual diachronic processes that result in gradient synchronic linguistic categories. This point has proved to be of crucial importance especially for the analysis of Vedic and Homeric multiple preverbs (cf. Chapters 4–5). In addition, by employing the grammaticalization theory and its intrinsic diachronic character, one can also assess the overall development of Indo-European preverbs by analyzing their behavior in sub-varieties that belong to very widely dispersed chronological layers. Specifically, as shown in Table 1, Vedic and Homeric Greek, on the one hand, and Old Church Slavic and Old Irish, on the other, are divided by a time gap of more than one millennium.

LANGUAGE TEXTS AND MANUSCRIPTS TIME PERIOD
Vedic R̥g-Veda 18th–12th centuries BC
Homeric Greek Iliad, Odyssey about 8th century BC
Old Irish Milan Glosses, Priscian Glosses 8th–9th centuries AD
Old Church Slavic Codex Marianus, Codex Zographensis, Codex Suprasliensis 10th–11th centuries AD

Tab. 1: Language sample, texts, and dating

Furthermore, the R̥g-Veda, the Homeric poems, and the Old Church Slavic texts represent literary corpora, in terms of their content and aims. Thus, their variety most likely does not faithfully mirror the actual usages of everyday speech (cf. Joseph & Janda 2003: 17–19). In addition, the Vedic hymns and the Homeric poems constitute poetic corpora. As such, they have to meet relatively rigid metrical requirements, which possibly also contributed to distancing the language from daily usage. Occasionally, meter might both constrain syntax in general, and word order in particular, as well as motivate otherwise obscure lexical choices (cf. Chapters 4 and 5, for further discussion and relevant examples).

For the Old Church Slavic texts and for the Old Irish glosses, one must take into account their undeniable interaction with the Greek source- and the Latin main texts. Thus, further issues relating to the employment of parallel (or quasi-parallel) corpora come into play, which have been touched upon in Sections 1.3.3 and 1.3.4, and further discussed in Chapters 6–7. However, with regard to our understanding of the formation process of multiple preverb composites, Greek and Latin equivalents have proved to be crucial, in that they can provide access points to the various degrees of lexicalization and semantic change affecting multiple preverb composites.

Multiple Preverbs in Ancient Indo-European Languages

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