Morphosyntaxis of Modern Greek Spatial Adverbs in a Diachronic Perspective

Abstract

Greek adverbs are often claimed to have almost completely lost the ability to govern the genitive case, which is replaced by prepositional phrases with the accusative. Nevertheless, the corpus study presented in the article demonstrates that some low-frequent spatial adverbs δεξιά/αριστερά ‘on the right/left’ and βόρεια/νότια/ανατολικά/δυτικά ‘in the north/south/east/west’ retain the ability to govern genitive along with prepositional phrases. Moreover, cardinal directions prefer this archaic model to all the other options. Cross-linguistically, lexical items traditionally classified as adverbs and/or adpositions often demonstrate mixed syntactic behavior, since adverbs that were relatively recentlyderived from nouns, can retain their initial nominal internal syntax. The diachronic development of the Greek adverbs ‘right/left’ and cardinal direction terms also have well traced nominal sources. In the present study I suggest that the mixed category analysis can be applied to some Modern Greek adverbs.