Abstract
This paper aims to show to which extent some Indo-European languag- es – namely Hittite, Tocharian, Ancient Greek and Lithuanian – encode the semantic function of direction: these languages have the peculiarity of using specific morphological markers other than the accusative case, which was the morphological case covering this function in Indo-European. Such forms are not etymologically related to each other and the extent to which they are embedded into paradigms is remarkably different. We will see that only Hittite encodes the directive function as autonomous morphological case. However the Hittite directive case shows some irregularities in its behavior: a scalar hypothesis will be proposed as explanation. Furthermore the description of such a case will be compared with the corresponding forms in the other mentioned languages, by underlining similarities and dif- ferences and specifying their degree of grammaticalization.