Redefining Constructio Praegnans: On the Variation between Allative and Locative Expressions in Ancient Greek

In traditional Ancient Greek grammar, the term constructio praegnans refers to an apparent syntactic anomaly whereby the idea of motion is missing from either the verb or the prepositional phrase: a verb that does not express motion is combined with a directional prepositional phrase (e.g., ‘slaughter into a container’) or a motion verb combines with a static prepositional phrase describing a goal of motion (e.g., ‘throw in the fire’). This study explores such usages in the period from Archaic to Classical Greek and argues against treating constructio praegnans as a unitary phenomenon. The seemingly aberrant combinations of the verb’s meaning and the type of prepositional phrase are shown to be motivated by four independent factors: 1) lexical (some individual non-motion verbs select for a directional argument); 2) aspectual (static encoding of endpoints is allowed with perfect participles); 3) the encoding of results with change of state verbs; and 4) the archaic use of static prepositional phrases in directional contexts (the goal argument of a motion verb is described by a static prepositional phrase). The four types of “pregnant” use are paralleled by different phenomena in other languages. Based on statistical analysis, they are also argued to undergo different kinds of diachronic development. Some of these developments, nevertheless, fall into a more general pattern: Ancient Greek gradually moves toward a more consistent use of specialized directional expressions to mark goals of motion, conforming increasingly to the “satellite-framed” type of motion encoding.

EXTENDED ABSOLUTE PARALLELISM GEOMETRY

In this paper, we study Absolute Parallelism (AP-) geometry on the tangent bundle TM of a manifold M. Accordingly, all geometric objects defined in this geometry are not only functions of the positional argument x, but also depend on the directional argument y. Moreover, many new geometric objects, which have no counterpart in the classical AP-geometry, emerge in this different framework. We refer to such a geometry as an Extended Absolute Parallelism (EAP-) geometry. The building blocks of the EAP-geometry are a nonlinear connection (assumed given a priori) and 2n linearly independent vector fields (of special form) defined globally on TM defining the parallelization. Four different d-connections are used to explore the properties of this geometry. Simple and compact formulae for the curvature tensors and the W-tensors of the four defined d-connections are obtained, expressed in terms of the torsion and the contortion tensors of the EAP-space. Further conditions are imposed on the canonical d-connection assuming that it is of Cartan type (resp. Berwald type). Important consequences of these assumptions are investigated. Finally, a special form of the canonical d-connection is studied under which the classical AP-geometry is recovered naturally from the EAP-geometry. Physical aspects of some of the geometric objects investigated are pointed out and possible physical implications of the EAP-space are discussed, including an outline of a generalized field theory on the tangent bundle TM of M.