The development of clause linkage in Hittite: Evidence from subordination (max 58,000 caratteri (original) (raw)
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Trends in the development of sentence connectives in Hittite: evidence from subordination
Old Hittite sentence connectives nu, ta and šu display a significantly different distribution when connecting a preposed subordinate clause to the main clause with respect to their distribution between main clauses. Other distributional restrictions concern ta and šu in all syntactic environments, but do not concern nu. The discourse function of connectives when they occur between main clauses points to partly different roles by which they variously indicate event and/or participant continuity, and contribute to the grounding of information. Ongoing increase in the frequency of P2 clitics also called for the occurrence of connectives as hosts. Lack of distributional restrictions on the occurrence of nu made it multifunctional, and suitable as a host for P2 clitics while preserving at least in part its original discourse function: this brought about the onset of a change by which nu replaced other connectives. The discourse function of connectives is blurred between a subordinate and a main clause, as subordinate clauses explicitly indicate their relation to the main clause. Due to its multi-functionality, nu also extended more readily to this syntactic environment, in which it developed into a boundary marker. Uneven distribution of connectives in different syntactic environments is a consequence of gradualness in actualization of languages change.
On Wh-(non)-movement and Internal Structures of the Hittite preposed Relative Clause
Relative constructions have received much attention from linguists over the past few decades as they are interesting on the level of their syntax, typology, and semantics. As a clause type, relative clauses (RCs) have a high frequency of usage, independent of text or register type, and in many languages they exhibit features such as movement or non-movement of the relativized Determiner Phrase (DP), the presence or absence of a resumptive constituent, and restrictive versus appositive semantics, all of which provide access to basic structural properties of a given language. Of the various syntactic strategies employed dealing with relativization (postnominal, prenominal, circumnominal, and correlative), Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language, predominantly exhibits the correlative construction.
The paper aims to provide a comprehensive description of Hittite clause structure. The picture that emerges is quite different from both the view of Hittite clause architecture as codified in (Hoffner, Melchert 2008) and as documented in the parallel line of research (Luraghi 1990; 2012; forthcoming). The paper focuses on two key features of Hittite clause architecture: (a) preverbal vs clause initial vs clause second positions; (b) verb’s positions in the clause, although in-depth study of these aspects involves examination of virtually every significant feature of Hittite syntax. Preverbal position is constituted by wh-words, subordinators, negation markers, negative, indefinite and relative pronouns as well as some adverbs, only part of these constituents can alternatively be clause initial or second. Contrastive focus is normally preverbal, contrastive topic is clause initial. Two focus positions are distinguished in a Hittite clause – high (subjects and objects) and low (adverbs, adverbials). Wh-words, subordinators and relative / indefinite pronouns can also be optionally postverbal. It is significant that only lower focus can be postverbal, never high focus, even though in the canonical word order both high and low focus is preverbal. No information structure difference is detectible between the preverbal and postverbal positions. It is shown that non-canonical positions of the verb can be described by two movements to the left from the canonical clause final position: (a) to the clause internal position which follows subject and object, both topical and focal, on the one hand, and precedes what is in the canonical word order the preverbal position5, on the other, producing V-wh/Neg/Rel, S-O-V- wh/Neg/Rel word orders; (b) to the clause leftmost position, producing V-S-O word order. *V- wh/Neg/Rel-S-O or *wh/Neg/Rel-V-S-O word orders are not attested in my ‘diplomatic’ corpus. The last point raises an important question of sociolinguistics of the Hittite language, namely evidence for (idio)lects.
Clitic Doubling: A New Syntactic Category in Hittite
Altorientalische Forschungen, 2011
The present paper seeks to differentiate between appositive dislocation and clitic doubling. Appositive dislocation is constituted by a stressed or unstressed pronoun plus a full NP in one clause. The pronoun and the full NP are coreferential, but lexically the full NP is not identical to the antecedent of the pronoun, nor does the full NP possess any discourse function, merely introducing additional information about the referent. Clitic doubling is constituted by an enclitic pronoun plus a full NP and has two varieties. In the first the full NP is not only coreferential with but also lexically identical to the full NP of the preceding clause, thus coding discourse status change of the NP. Clitic doubling of the second type is not only lexically different from the full NP of the preceding context, neither is it coreferential with it. The discourse function in this case is to mark the new topic.
Hittite Correlative Resumption as Discourse Anaphora
Proceedings of the 31st Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, 2020
The most common way of forming relative clauses in Hittite is with a relative-correlative structure, consisting of a relative clause and a "resumptive" clause following it. The resumptive clause may contain a DP element that "resumes" the relative clause in the sense that it has the same discourse referent as the relative clause. In this paper, I examine how resumption of correlative relative clauses is handled by Hittite grammar: what elements can be used for resumption and what determines their distribution. Correlatives share the same set of elements and strategies for resumption as discourse referents continued between independent sentences. Because of this, there is no need to assume any special syntactic rules for the relative-correlative structure beyond what is independently needed for cross-sentential anaphora. The parallelism with sentences in discourse also suggests that the relationship between relative clause and resumptive clause is a discourse relation, not a syntactic one.
Enclitic -(m)a ‘but’, clause architecture and the prosody of focus in Hittite
We discuss the extraordinary syntax of the enclitic -(m)a: as different from other enclitics it does not cliticize to a set of words like nu, mān, etc. How- ever, as different from -pat with its free distribution within the clause -(m)a attests a very clear tendency to be positioned after the first stressed word. To make things even more complicated, in the focusing function it attests a seemingly free posi- tion in the clause. The paradox of -(m)a is that most of the details of its aberrant syntactic behavior, save some clause internal usage which we are demonstrating for the first time, are perfectly well known, but several pieces of evidence have never been brought together. The main of them is the fact that the set of words which does not host -(m)a as well as -ya is precisely the set of words which is not taken into consideration when the second position of such constituents as relative pronouns in determinate clauses, subordinators maḫḫan and kuit is determined. The paper also provides a unitary explanation of both topicalising -(m)a in the left periphery and focusing -(m)a in the preverbal position: the common feature might be the prosodic boundary to the left of both hosts triggered by information structure to the left of the host of both topicalizing -(m)a/additively focusing -ya in the left periphery and focusing -(m)a/ya preverbally.