A New Look At The Indo European Verb

This book explores the origin and evolution of important grammatical categories of the Indo-European verb, including the markers of person, tense, number, aspect, and mood. Its central thesis is that many of these markers can be traced to original deictic particles which were incorporated into verbal structures in order to indicate the 'hic and nunc' and various degrees of remoteness from the 'hic and nunc'. The alterations to which these deictic elements were subject are viewed here in the context of an Indo-European language very different from Brugmannian Indo-European, many features of which, it is argued, appeared only in the period of dialectal development. This book challenges numerous traditional proposals about the Indo-European verb; all reconstructions contained in it are firmly based on extant data and are consonant with established principles of linguistic change.

"Jasanoff comes up with some of the strongest arguments yet made for assuming that Indo-European languages other than Hittite and Tocharian underwent a substantial period of common development, and this needs to be fitted into any model of the dispersal of the language family." James Clackson, Times Literary Supplement |d 05/03/2004 This book reconciles what is known of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system with the evidence of Hittite and the other early Anatolian languages. The decipherment of Hittite in 1917 and the recognition that it was an Indo-European language had dramatic consequences for conceptions of the Indo-European parent language. For most of the twentieth century, attention focused on the peculiarities of Hittite phonology, especially the consonant h and its implications for the evolving laryngeal theory. Yet the morphological 'disconnects' between Hittite and the other early languages are more profound than the phonological differences. The Hittite verbal system lacks most of the familiar tense-aspect categories of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. It also presents the novelty of the hi-conjugation, a purely formal conjugation class to which nearly half of all Hittite verbs belong. Repeated attempts to explain the hi-conjugation on the basis of the classical model of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system have failed. The question is not whether the conventional picture of the parent language must be modified to account for the facts of Hittite, but how. In this outstanding book Professor Jasanoff puts forward a new and revolutionary model of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system that promises to have a major impact on Indo-European studies. His strikingly original synthesis, reflecting a quarter-century-long study of the problem, is the most thorough and systematic attempt thus far to bridge the gap between Hittite and the other Indo-European languages.

A new look at the passive is an investigation of the possibility of establishing a cross-linguistically valid characterization of the passive in terms of its morphological and syntactic properties. When it comes to morphology it is demonstrated that the traditional conception of the morpheme with its emphasis on the relationship between form and meaning must be replaced by a semiotic framework which distinguishes structural and functional properties of morphological categories. The passive is then shown to be a functional property of various, yet distinct morphological categories and not a structural property of a single category; thus the passive cannot be defined as a cross-linguistically valid morphological category. When it comes to syntax it is demonstrated that the passive cannot be defined as a syntactic structure, a syntactic process, nor a means of changing grammatical functions/relations. It is furthermore demonstrated that current typological attempts at defining the passive in terms of a prototype fail to give us a valid characterization of the passive. Finally, it is suggested that the passive can be defined as a complex cognitive structure composed of a number of distinct features, each of which corresponds to the structural meaning/function of those individual morphological categories that are employed in the expression of passive constructions.