Case Attraction in Ancient Greek

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. The attempt to describe case as a stable, syntactic phenomenon is belied by instances of what is known as case conflict. This paper investigates a particular type of case conflict, case attraction, which involves relative pronouns and their antecedents. Case attraction has long been seen as an exception to the general rule of case assignment, but I will argue in what follows that, once the conditions under which case attraction are clarified, and a given case’s relation to semantic content is secured, case attraction must no longer be seen as an aberration, but rather as consistent with the general principles of case assignment. The organization of the paper is as follows. I begin by summarizing the data from Ancient Greek, paying particular attention to the distribution of the phenomenon and the frequencies therein. Case attraction will be seen as crucially linked to the thematic, or agentivity, properties associated with a given case, and a general framework for connecting case and agentivity via a lattice structure will be exposed in section 2. The case system of Ancient Greek is then mapped upon the lattice, determining a hierarchical relation on the case system. Section 3 unifies the foregoing analysis of case attraction with the semantic agentivity properties to account for case attraction and its distribution within the Optimality Theory (OT) framework. 1 Delimiting Case Attraction Languages which dispose of case systems use case in order to display the syntactic function of lexical items within the clause. Yet, case assignment can also be B.D. ten Cate and H.W. Zeevat (Eds.): TbiLLC 2005, LNAI 4363, pp. 139–153, 2007. c © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007