The case of πάννυχος Ζεὺς: an explanation of cognitive nature

The paper aims at exploiting the heuristic tools of the cognitive linguistics to attempt an interpretation of the Greek compound adjective πάννυχος ‘all night long’ in connection with the nominative Ζεὺς (Il. 7, 478 and Od. 14, 457-458). The compound, which conveys an adverbial spatio-temporal notion, seems connected with the referent Ζεὺς, in virtue of the god’s faculty to govern the temporal sequence, as well as it can be recognized for the “zero valency” meteorological verbs, which display the name of the entity who causes the phenomenon (e.g. ὕει ‘it rains’ vs Ζεὺς ὕει ‘Zeus rains’). In the light of this approach, the compound πάννυχος will be analysed focussing on the word-class and its encoding, and evaluating how the re-working on semantics has a relapse in the entrance-strategy into the syntax.