Vestnik Pravoslavnogo Svâto-Tihonovskogo Gumanitarnogo Universiteta: Seriâ III. Filologiâ (Dec 2019)
Spatial relations “right vs. left” in Katharevousa: corpus-based study
Abstract
This article deals with the encoding of “right” and “left” in the offi cial language of Greece until 1976, which never functioned as a spoken native variety. Katharevousa provides signifi cant data on intentionally archaising, artifi cial language variety of the 19th — 20th centuries. The study demonstrates the instability of this register in the domain of peripheral spatial relations. Since Katharevousa is an archaising language, one can suppose that it would copy the ancient means of marking “right” and “left”. On the other hand, the language was artifi cial but based on the variety spoken by educated Greek people; therefore, strategies of the spoken language of that time can also be expected. The manifestation of these spatial relations is usually not codifi ed in grammar books, which is the reason why in this domain one can fi nd an opportunity to analyse intuitive choices of speakers. This study explores the issue in question drawing on corpus evidence; 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. The results demonstrate that even translators of ancient texts did not simply copy the Ancient Greek means of marking left and right and preferred an innovative strategy, i.e. the use of adverbs (δεξιά vs. αριστερά ‘on the right / left’) and dynamic means of marking static location. It is obvious not only from the translations, but also from the quantitative distribution of the markers. Moreover, the choice of the spatial marker can depend on extralinguistic factors, such as the genre of the text. Katharevousa abounds in strategies not attested or extremely rare in Ancient and Modern Greek (e. g. the archaic affi x -θεν in the adverb δεξιόθεν ‘from the right’). To summarise, the archaisation in spatial strategies is rather selective and depends on preferences of a particular writer as well as on extralinguistic factors; it is mostly infl uenced by the Old and New Testament texts, rather than by the Classical Antiquity.
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