Ricerc@Sapienza

Primary, prototypical prepositions in German govern accusative and dative. The difference between the two cases is semantically motivated, not only for the prepositions governing two cases (an, auf, hinter, in, neben, über, unter, vor, zwischen), but also for prepositions allowing one option: accusative for bis, durch, für, gegen, ohne, um; dative for ab, aus, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu. Accusative appears to be associated with goal-orientedness and completeness, the dative represents an elsewhere condition.

Impersonal verbs and constructions attested in ancient Indo-European languages show a marked uniformity at both semantic and structural levels, even though the etymons of the forms involved are often different. This allows us to surmise that these constructions were inherited from Proto-Indo-European. In this scenario both Ancient Greek and ancient Indo-Iranian languages differ from other varieties of the Indo-European family since they have relatively few impersonal verbs and constructions.

The most important functions of the accusative in Old Persian are consistent with those in other ancient Indo-European languages: it marks the direct object of transitive verbs, and can express the spatial notions of goal and path, as well as the temporal notion of duration. Besides these functions, there are other, in some way ‘rare’ or ‘particular’ occurrences of the Old Persian accusative that have not yet been explained, or not explained convincingly. This paper aims to investigate two interesting uses of the accusative: the double accusative construction and the mām kāma construction.