Nasal presents from Homer to Attic Greek: Analogy and reanalysis in the Greek verb

Abstract

This thesis investigates the history and development of the ancient Greek "nasal presents": verbs which characterize their imperfective stems with one of a variety of morphemes which include a nasal consonant. The focus of the thesis is on those classes of Greek nasal presents which are ultimately descended from the Proto-Indo-European nasal affix presents, traces of which are attested in all other Indo-European languages as well. Two present-characterizing nasal morphemes are reconstructible for Proto-Indo-European: an ablauting nasal infix *-né-/-n-́ and a nasal suffix *-néw-/*-nu-́, with a broadly transitivizing function. Greek inherited numerous individual presents so characterized, which form the core of a number of Greek verbal classes. A major contribution of this thesis is the delimiting of these classes: the identification of the inherited verbs and the innovative verbs, and the tracing of the history of each Greek verbal subclass back to its Proto-Indo-European origins. The subtypes discussed include the original nasal infix presents to laryngeal-final roots (e.g., bállō 'throw', dámnēmi 'subdue', stórnūmi 'stretch out [trans.]'), the inherited nasal-suffix presents (e.g., órnūmi 'rouse, raise [trans.]') the infix presents to consonant final roots remodeled as various types of nasal suffix presents (e.g., omórgnūmi 'wipe, dry [trans.]'), and various nasal suffix presents that are Greek innovations (e.g., deíknūmi 'show', daínūmi 'give a feast', etc.). The development of these subclasses of verbs in Greek itself- i.e., their growth or decline, and their analogical reshaping and remodeling- is also discussed in detail. Although Indo-European nasal presents in general are a topic of perennial discussion in Indo-European linguistics, there have been no modern works dedicated solely to the history and development of Greek nasal presents in particlar. Further, traditional works have focused primarily on aspects of the morphology of the individual verbs but have not investigated these verbs in detail with respect to their lexico-semantic categories. A major contribution of this thesis is the systematic analysis of Greek nasal presents according to their lexical semantics; in particular, this thesis demonstrates that although the nasal affixes were not productive in Greek in a causative function, a great number of inherited Greek nasal presents retain the semantic and morphological traces of the Indo-European nasal affixes' function as a transitivizing morpheme.