Formulaic Networks as Prototypical Categories: Combining the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank with the Ancient Greek WordNet for a Pilot Study on the Iliad

This paper proposes a corpus-based methodology to investigate Homeric formulas through the lenses of Cognitive Linguistics, specifically of Construction Grammar and Prototype Theory. More or less lexically filled formulas can be displayed along a lexicon-syntax continuum of increasing abstractedness. We use the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank enhanced with metrical annotation and semantic information from the Ancient Greek WordNet to study the Iliadic language, by extracting formulas of COMMUNICATION and KILLING occurring under specific syntactic and metrical conditions. We show that all extracted patterns build a formulaic network that can be understood as a prototypical category: all patterns share certain, but not all, features with the prototypical formula, which is chosen based on frequency reasons; they can display features typical of formulas of other categories, which could thus be linked in a larger network. This framework and methodology are useful to jointly account for formulas traditionally treated separately and could be employed to improve existing language resources with updated formulaic data.