Abstract Possession and Experiential Expression. Some Preliminary Remarks

Recent years have seen increasing attention paid to experiential constructions in Ancient Greek, above all in Homeric Greek, and various studies based on different approaches have been published (see, for example, Dahl 2014, and Luraghi & Sausa 2015). One of the interesting characteristics of the experiential expressions is the variety of encoding not only cross-linguistically and diachronically, but also synchronically from an intralinguistic point of view, as typological data shows (e.g. Verhoeven 2007). Consistently with this scenario, also Ancient Greek texts testifies a variety of experiential constructions, with different argument structures and encodings of both the Experiencer and the Stimulus role. Given that, this paper, drawing on a study of possessive predicative constructions with ‘εἶναι plus genitive’ and ‘εἶναι plus dative’ in Ancient Greek, which have been discussed in detail elsewhere (Benvenuto and Pompeo 2012; 2015), presents the preliminary results of the examination of experiential constructions in the domain of the so-called abstract possession construction. In this respect, we analyzed syntactic, semantic, and communicative factors following a constructional approach in line with the work of Adele Goldberg (1995, 2006) and William Croft (2001).