非階層型言語における与格名詞句の位置について : 古典ギリシア語からのデータに基づく機能的分析 <論文>

This article deals with the question of the basic word order in double object construction in Classical Greek: the main claim is that ACCUSATIVE - DATIVE order is basic, and that DATIVE - ACCUSATIVE order is secondary.

It is widely known that various word orders are possible in Classical Greek. Many analysts say, however, that the word order in Classical Greek is not perfectly free and that there must be a basic (or 'habitual' ) word order. To examine this hypothesis, this article focuses on the order of accusative and dative noun phrases in the double object construction. As a "corpus", the ten works written by Euripides were adopted, from which examples with "didoomi" (to give) were collected.

Many of the examples were classifiable into two groups, DATIVE - ACCUSATIVE and ACCUSATIVE - DATIVE, and moreover, they were analyzed in terms of "the functional sentence perspective" (i.e., that an element with more information precedes another element with less information (Fukuchi,1984)). It was found that the DATIVE - ACCUSATIVE examples tended to be compatible with the above-mentioned perspective, whereas the ACCUSATIVE - DATIVE examples were, in many cases, incompatible. This implies that ACCUSATIVE - DATIVE word order is determined by some principle other than this perspective. The ACCUSATIVE - DATIVE may be the originally fixed order, from which the DATIVE - ACCUSATIVE order is secondarily derived. The latter can be explained in terms of the functional sentence perspective.