How should a "classical" Satellite-Framed Language behave? Path encoding asymmetries in Ancient Greek and Latin

This paper discusses the encoding of motion events in a corpus of Ancient Greek and Latin texts, focusing on the differences in the expression of Sources and Goals in the two languages (both classified as Satellite-Framed in Talmy’s typology). For this analysis, we have adopted a number of parameters suitable for the investigation of Source and Goal encoding in Path expressions. The corpus has been manually tagged with the help of a software tool dedicated to motion event annotation (Modeg). The results of the analysis confirm the widespread tendency to express Goal more frequently and in a more detailed way compared to Source, and reveal subtle differences in the way in which Ancient Greek and Latin combine prepositional marking with directional preverbs. We argue that the common tendency to express simple Paths (mostly Goal-oriented) can be interpreted from a diachronic perspective as one of the main factors enhancing the diachronic change of both languages towards the preference for the VerbFramed type of encoding