Пространственные отношения «справа/слева» в кафаревусе: корпусное исследование

Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета. Серия 3: Филология. 2019. Т. 58. № 1. С. 43–58.

Yakovleva A.

The paper deals with the encoding of “right” and “left” in Katharevousa Greek, which provides us with worth-exploring data on intentionally archaizing, artificial language of the XIX-XX centuries. The research is carried out on the basis of the Corpus of Modern Greek and the translations of two Classical Greek texts (“Anabasis” by Xenophon and “The History of the Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides) into Katharevousa.
Since Katharevousa is an archaizing language, one can suppose that it would copy the ancient means of marking “right” and “left”. On the other hand, the language was artificial, but based on the language variety, spoken by educated Greek people – so, the strategies of the spoken language of that time can also be expected. Such rules are not usually mentioned in grammar books, and in this domain we get an opportunity to analyze speakers’ intuitive choices.
According to the available data, the translators used utterly different strategies than the ancient writers. This language prefers dynamic projections and adverbs to static prepositions, which is obvious not only from the translations, but also from the quantitative distribution of the markers. The archaization in spatial strategies is quiet selective and influenced mostly by the Old and New Testament texts, rather than by the Classical Antiquity. Moreover, the choice of the spatial marker can depend on extralinguistic factors.

Keywords: архаизация, корпусная лингвистика, греческий язык, corpus linguistics, диглоссия, пространственные отношения, spatial relations, archaization, greek language, katharevousa, кафаревуса, diglossia