Accusatives as default options: Meronymic Unions in Ancient Greek

This paper proposes a morphosyntactic and semantic analysis of two Ancient Greek constructions: the accusative of respect and the whole/part schema, the relationship between which has long been intuited in historical grammar. It is argued that these are not possessive constructions, but rather meronymic constructions, and more specifically, meronymic unions. They display precise semantic and syntactic constraints shared by meronymic unions in various non-Indo-European traditions. Moreover, it is argued that these constructions instantiate the occurrence of the accusative as the default case.