Читать книгу Multiple Preverbs in Ancient Indo-European Languages - Chiara Zanchi - Страница 25

As discussed in Section 2.3.2, at a synchronic level, it is often impossible unambiguously to assign a morpheme or a construction to a discrete grammatical category (e.g. Hopper 1987; Givón 1979; Haspelmath 2011). Such synchronic gradience can be seen as a side-effect of diachronic gradualness (Hopper 1987; Bybee & Hopper 2001). In other words, “since grammaticalization is generally regarded as a gradual diachronic process, it is expected that the resulting function words form a gradient from full content words to clear function words” (Haspelmath 2001: 16539). This relies on the continuum that characterizes grammaticalization, which provides a more useful basis for understanding even the synchronic gradience structure. In this light, grammaticalization approaches also call into question the traditional dichotomy between synchronic vs. diachronic analyses (cf. Mithun 2011 for a discussion and a case-study on Navajo, a Na-Dené language spoken in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado).

Such an approach to grammaticalization, which is based on the assumption that its diachronic gradualness results in a synchronic gradience, is particularly helpful to analyze the development of preverbs, especially in a sample including languages that are diachronically distributed (roughly, Vedic: 18^th–12^th centuries BC; Homeric Greek: 8^th century BC; Old Irish: 7^th–9^th AD; Old Church Slavic: 9^th–11^th centuries AD; cf. Section 1.3), and whose corpora are intrinsically diachronic, such as those of Vedic, Homeric Greek, Old Church Slavic and Old Irish (cf. Chapter 1). As discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, the Vedic and Homeric languages especially mirror the stratification of different stages of Old Indo-Aryan and Ancient Greek. Thus, a purely synchronic analysis would have led to a multiplicity of categories, as a number of linguistic forms, including preverbs, show multiple functions and, from the linguists’ viewpoint, seem to belong to more than one category. Rather, the uncertain behaviors shown by a number of forms arguably reflect the gradual steps in their grammaticalization path, which their diachronically stratified corpora show us.