Tocharian and Indo-European Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Typological studies in language, 1995
Initial verbs are a rather popular topic in word order studies, as shown by the titles of the papers in this volume. My paper, while approaching the same topic as others, does not fit in the main stream of studies on inital verbs, in that it is not devoted to any verb-initial language. The languages that I will discuss all have a possible verb-initial word order pattern, which, however, does not represent either the basic or the most frequent word order.
Proto-Indo-European verbal syntax
Journal of Indo-European Studies, 1983
I. In 1901 CC Uhlenbeck concluded from the identity of the nominative and the accusative of the neuter in the Indo-Euro-pean languages that the differentiation of these cases is second-ary. For an early period of the proto-language he assumes the existence of an agentive ...
A New Look at the Indo-European Verb
On the basis of a fresh reanalysis and comparison of linguistic data, mainly taken from the major ancient Indo-European languages, I have developed a new overall explanation for the verb system of the protolanguage which, among other things, fully confirms the recent view that Proto-Indo-European might have belonged to a thoroughly different typology from that of its descendant languages. Many unresolved issues of historical-comparative reconstruction can find a straightforward solution in the light of my hypothesis; such as the origin of tense, mood, aspect, diathesis, etc. You will see that the original verb system was quite different from both the Hittite and the Greek one. Many verb categories, which were very important for the daughter languages, did not even exist in the protolanguage, and other categories, which were originally central to the protolanguage, have disappeared in all the descendant languages. In this regard, the key concept is the control on action by the subject. This was what really mattered!