Alignment Change and the Emergence of the Thematic Conjugation from Proto‐Indo‐European to Indo‐European: A Wedding of Hypotheses (original) (raw)
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The thematic inflection in Proto-Indo-European conjugation: a kind of perfect or a kind of aorist?
In the talk it is argued that in PIE the so-called thematic present stems originally inflected in the same way as the so-called athematic ones. In the singular, the difference between the " primary " indicative mood inflectional forms and their " secondary " injunctive mood counterparts was marked solely by PIE *-i attached to the relevant verb form. This means that this part of the PIE conjugation system was nearly identical with what is attested in ancient Indo-Iranian. The deviating " primary " inflectional forms in the individual IE languages can be plausibly explained within the individual history of these languages. Such explanations become available as soon as one takes into consideration (a) the laws of final syllables relevant to these particular languages, (b) the possibility of a recent univerbation of finite verbs with sentence particles and other clitics.
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 ...
The Anatolian languages are unique among the Indo-European languages in having a suffix for neuter nouns in the agent position, hereafter referred to as the agentive suffix. There exist several theories concerning the grammatical analysis of this suffix (Melchert 2007). In this article I expand on research by Goedebuure (2013) by testing these theories for all languages in which this construction is attested. It turns out that the agentive was originally a personifying suffix *-ont-, a function still present in Old Hittite and Luwian. This suffix was grammaticalised into a grammatical suffix already in Proto-Anatolian. This suffix could only occur in the common gender nominative. In Neo-Hittite, the construction-ant-s/-ant-es was reanalysed as case endings-anza/-anteš of a new ergative case appearing only in the neuter gender. A similar reanalysis was happening in Lycian. The suffix *-ont-was grammaticalised in order to be able to form neuter agents, which was impossible in Proto-Indo-European. The non-Anatolian Indo-European languages filled this gap by extending the function of the neutral subject/patient ending *-Ø and *-om to the agent function. This shared innovation constitutes an argument in favour of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis.
Typology, grammaticalization, and the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European case system
Recent publications have challenged many of the long-held assumptions about the reconstruction and prehistory of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) case system. In this lecture, I summarize these findings and evaluate their importance for Indo-European (IE) and general historical linguistics. Not only is the number of cases to be reconstructed for PIE called into question, but the agglutinative or “secondary” cases of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages, long regarded as typologically odd, are shown to be well motivated developments with numerous parallels within IE and elsewhere. The semantic reinterpretation of adverbial markers as case markers, and the grammaticalization of postpositional phrases as univerbated case forms, must have been taking place already in the late stages of the protolanguage. These results allow us to view the notoriously complex PIE case system, with its elaborate system of portmanteau endings marking case, number, and inflectional class, in wider typological perspective, and to better understand its historical evolution in the various IE languages.
Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2013
Starting from the analysis of constructions employed to express the category of reflexive in Hittite, encoded both by the verbal ending set of the middle and by the pronominal marker -za with both active and middle verbal forms, we present a typological parallelism with the Baltic languages that has consistently developed, from a pronominal, a verbal strategy to mark reflexivity. It is also shown that a development regarding the ways of encoding reflexivity involve other Indo-European languages as well. The Anatolian languages attest the reflexes of the original set of endings referring to the semantic categories of Reflexive, Middle and “Resultative”, while the other Indo-European languages attest an innovated “mixed morphology” for the category of Middle and Reflexive as opposed to the proper endings of the historical perfect. Within such a theoretical framework, the development of alternative strategies, using pronominal devices or particles, aims to disambiguate a wide polysemou...
Tlie PIE gender system consisted of two genders, most likely animate and neuter; the earliest manifestations of feminine gender were derivational and involved the suffix *-h2, which in origin derived abstract nouns. This suffix also gave origin to the neuter nominative-accusative plural, formerly a collective rather than a count plural. The semantic development is accompanied by morphological change: in the case of the neuter nominative-accusative plural, a derivational suffix became an inflectional ending, while, in the case o f feminine gender, a derivational suffix became the marker o f an inflectional class. The two morphological developments are different, and there is no reason for assuming that one of them implied the other. However, when discussing the semantic aspect of the change, it is generally assumed that either collective preceded feminine or the other way around. In my paper I suggest a different solution by considering that the two developments must be kept separated.