Indo European Nominal Morphology

Literaturverz. S. [187] - 200.

Torsten Meissner examines a group of nouns and adjectives, all formed with the same suffix, and explains their morphology and semantics, from prehistoric times throughout the Classical period of Greece, furthering our understanding of the Greek language.

In the historical development of many languages of the IE phylum the loss of inflectional morphology led to the development of a configurational syntax, where syntactic position marked syntactic role. The first of these configurations was the adposition (preposition or postposition), which developed out of the uninflected particle/preverbs in the older forms of IE, by forming fixed phrases with nominal elements, a pattern later followed in the development of a configurational NP (article + nominal) and VP (auxiliary + verbal). The authors follow this evolution through almost four thousand years of documentation in all twelve language families of the Indo-European phylum, noting the resemblances between the structure of the original IE case system and the systemic oppositions to be found in the sets of adpositions that replaced it. Quite apart from its theoretical analyses and proposals which in themselves amount to a new look at many traditional problems, this study has a value in the collected store of information on cases, and on adpositions and their usage. There is also a considerable store of etymological information that is relevant to the description of the systemic development.

This book contains twenty articles on the subject of derivational morphology in Indo-European languages, and is the result of the conference "Indo-European Word Formation", held in Copenhagen, October 20th - 22nd 2000. The papers, covering all areas of Indo-European, make substantial contributions to the current intensive research on word formation, and many of them break new ground or shed new light on old problems. While some contributions are particularly concerned with the construction of theoretical models of Indo-European, others continue the traditional philological research into corpus languages. Finally, such issues as the borderland between morphology and syntax and the potential connection between Indo-European and other language families are brought up for discussion. Contributions by: Fabrice Cavoto, Paul S. Cohen, George Dunkel, Adam Hyllested, Britta Irslinger, Folke Josephson, Konstantin Krasukhin, Martin Kûmmel, Jenny Larsson, Rosemarie Lühr, Michael Meier-Brügger, Benedicte Nielsen, Alan Nussbaum, Birgit Olsen, Natalia Pimenova, Jens Elmegård Rasmussen, Elisabeth Rieken, Velizar Sadovski, Woiciech Smoczynski, Brent Vine og Gordon Whittaker.

Volume II of this Manual deals with Indo-European nominal and verbal morphology; the morphology of the pronouns will be dealt with in volume III. The treatment of nominal and verbal morphology is preceded by an introduction in which the authors present their theory of root formation in Indo-European and their view of particular, idiosyncratic grammatical mechanisms. The description and reconstruction of the respective word classes follows the procedure based on F.R. Adrados' theory of the gradual dialectalization of Indo-European. The starting point is the reconstruction of nominal and verbal morphology at the level of "Indo-European III," i.e. the linguistic stage following the separation of the Anatolian group from the rest of Indo-European. Subsequently, a description is offered of the situation of "Indo-European II," i.e. the linguistic stage prior to the separation of the Anatolian languages. Finally, a reconstruction of "Indo-European I," the pre-inflectional stage of Indo-European, is attempted.

Nominal apposition—the combining of two equivalent nouns—has been a neglected topic in linguistics, despite its prominence in syntax and morphology in some languages. This book presents an extensive comparative and diachronic analysis of nominal apposition in Indo-European, examining its occurrence, characteristics and functions in early languages, identifying parallels with similar phenomena elsewhere, and tracing its evolution in Latin-Romance.

Nominal apposition—the combining of two equivalent nouns—has been a neglected topic in linguistics, despite its prominence in syntax and morphology in some languages. This book presents an extensive comparative and diachronic analysis of nominal apposition in Indo-European, examining its occurrence, characteristics and functions in early languages, identifying parallels with similar phenomena elsewhere, and tracing its evolution in Latin-Romance.