I composti preposizionali negli archivi in lineare B

Valentina Gasbarra Pasiphae. Rivista di filologia e antichità egee 3 (2009) [2010]: 91-98.

Abstract

Composition is one of the most important linguistic available process to create new words. Composition has been viewed in current linguistic works as the process of linking together two existing stems from the lexicon of a language to form a new one, more complex, which has the potential to enter the lexicon as a stable morphological unit. In ancient Greek, nominal composition plays an important role, which is documented by the variety of productive compositional types and by the frequency of compound words in the texts. The decipherment of Linear B and the publication of Mycenaean archives have led us to examine how compounding works in Mycenaean and the connections between Mycenaean and the first-millennium Greek forms. Even though Mycenaean tablets consist exclusively in bureaucratic documents, they testify all the compositional categories of later Greek: possessive exocentric compounds, determinative endocentric compounds, prepositional and verbal governing compounds. Prepositional compounds, based on a prepositional syntagm which “governs” the second member, are particularly productive in the field of personal appellatives and toponymic designations and they display the tendency of Mycenaean language in replacing some terminological blank with compound neologisms, which often are not yet included in the vocabulary and for this reason with an high degree of internal transparency and a clear recognizability of the constituents.