Classical Greek object cases

Abstract

We examine here the distribution of morphological case (e.g., accusative, genitive, and dative) among object complements of monotransitive verbs in Classical Greek (CG). Accusative-marked objects are generally deemed to be direct objects (DO), while dative- and genitive-marked complements are typically treated as syntactically or semantically separate, sometimes being treated as objects bearing exceptional/semantic/quirky case and sometimes being analyzed simply as indirect objects (IO). Restricting our focus to verbs which have a single complement, we can observe that the distribution of accusative (ACC), genitive (GEN), and dative (DAT) marking on these in CG is atypical. CG productively places DAT and GEN NP s alongside ACC NP s as a singular complement to monotransitive verbs, allowing them to occupy what would normally be thought of as the direct-object position, but for their GEN and DAT case-marking. We offer an analysis of these verbs and their semanto-syntactic collocations, seeking to understand what is communicated through the marking of either ACC, GEN, or DAT on complement NP s. We find first that ACC and GEN-marking verbs interact in a transitivity hierarchy, being set apart by the change of state of the object (following an analysis laid out by Luraghi 2010). Second, we find that DAT-marking verbs exist outside of this hierarchy, making up their own productive class of interaction verbs, those which denote a complex series of overlapping subevents (first laid out by Blume 1998). Thus, this study offers an analysis of a wide array of ACC, GEN, and DAT case-marking verbs collected from a corpus of nine Classical Greek authors, providing the first statistical analysis of the conundrum of ‘atypical’ case-selection patterns of Classical Greek monotransitive verbs, wherein non-ACC cases are used to mark what appear to be DO s.