Читать книгу Multiple Preverbs in Ancient Indo-European Languages - Chiara Zanchi - Страница 36

As this work deals with different ancient Indo-European languages, including Vedic, Homeric Greek, Old Church Slavic, and Old Irish, in which these morphemes exhibit quite different statuses and behaviors, terminological choices turned out to be particularly problematic: specifically, non-neutral terms such as “place words” or “prefixes” would be particularly inadequate. For example, “place words” as well as “local particles” are inadequate to name Slavic and Old Irish preverbs, which are quite advanced in their grammaticalization and lexicalization processes, and thus only infrequently show mere spatial semantics. Conversely, the label “prefixes” is adequate for Slavic, in which preverbs exhibit the morphological status of bound morphemes. However, this choice would be totally confusing for Vedic and Homeric Greek, in which preverbs partly retain their syntactic independence, and partially misleading for Old Irish, in which the outermost preverb holds instead a clitic status.

Therefore, I opted for what I regard as the most neutral terminological choices. The morphemes belonging to the category of ADVs-ADPs-PREVs are called “preverbs” (also in tmesis position), unless clearly noun-oriented. If noun-oriented, these morphemes are variably called “adpositions”, “prepositions” or “postpositions”. Preverb-verb combinations of all languages are referred to as “composites”, rather than “compounds”, as the latter term usually implies a certain degree of univerbation.1 In Vedic and Homeric Greek, however, it is not the case that these preverb-verb combinations actually represent single words in all contexts: thus, the term “composites” seems to me more appropriate due to its neutrality as to univerbation.