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Root lexical features and inflectional marking of tense in Proto-Indo-European1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2009

ANNAMARIA BARTOLOTTA
ANNAMARIA BARTOLOTTA*
Affiliation:
Università di Palermo
*
Author's address: Department of Philological and Linguistic Sciences, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, 90128, Palermo, Italy[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition. The dispute over this issue is well-known; it has been pursued mostly by scholars following various general linguistic approaches, from typology to acquisition, but also by historical linguists and Indo-Europeanists, who have long debated about the precedence of aspect or tense from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. However, so far Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a successful way with recent research in other fields such as acquisition or neurolinguistics. The aim of this paper is to put forward evidence from the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system concerning the prominent role of root lexical aspect features in the emergence of grammatical marking of tense in the proto-language. More precisely, by means of a comparison between the residual archaic verbal forms of the injunctive in Vedic Sanskrit and the corresponding augmentless preterites in Homeric Greek, it will be argued that the [±telic] lexical feature of the inherited verbal root is responsible for a non-random distribution of past tense inflected forms in an earlier verbal paradigm.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , November 2009 , pp. 505 - 532
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

[1]

Part of the material in this paper was presented at the Conference on Tense, Aspect, Mood, and Modality, CHRONOS 7 (University of Antwerp, September 2006). I am grateful to two anonymous JL referees and an associate editor for their useful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. I would also thank Ewa Jaworska for her careful editing of the manuscript.

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