Strategies for aligning syntactic roles and case marking with semantic properties

Abstract

In the present paper, we show that: (1) the accusative of respect, a case marker for inalienable possession in ancient Greek, represents a strategy for aligning syntactic roles and case marking with animacy; (2) this hypothesis can consistently account for a series of issues that remained unsettled; (3) the semantic properties of the predicate involved in the accusative of respect are fundamental to defining its function and specifically govern its distribution. Our analysis comprises Greek literary texts, from Homer to the fifth century B.C.