Abstract
Case attraction has stood as a puzzling, and elusive, oddity of older Indo-European languages. This paper focuses on attraction in Ancient Greek, establishing both the regularity of the operation and its underlying motivation. A novel method is proposed for grounding case in terms of a feature-based representation of agentivity properties, loosely based on Dowty’s proto-role theory, but reformulated in terms of privative opposition and hierarchically organized via a lattice. This structure is then used to model the case system of Ancient Greek and derive a hierarchical ordering on the case system in terms of agentivity. Modelling the interaction between this hierarchy and the other factors involved in case attraction in the Optimality Theory framework yields a full solution, predicting both its distribution and frequencies therein.
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Grimm, S. (2007). Case Attraction in Ancient Greek. In: ten Cate, B.D., Zeevat, H.W. (eds) Logic, Language, and Computation. TbiLLC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4363. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75144-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75144-1_11
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