Dental-aspirate presents in Greek and Indo-European

Abstract

This work examines the class of Greek presents in -θε/ο- and, by comparison with cognate formations in the other Indo-European daughter languages, attempts to recover the form and function of the dental aspirate suffix in the protolanguage. The investigation is centered around Greek, because this is the language in which dh-presents are most abundantly and most clearly attested. Chapter 2 reviews the evidence from Greek and demonstrates that Greek verbs bearing this suffix regularly show full grade of the root and are conspicuous for being active but intransitive, especially in the earliest period. Chapter 3 collects and evaluates the scattered evidence for this present type in Indo-Iranian, Italic, Celtic, Armenian and Tocharian. The situation in these languages matches closely that of Greek and in particular confirms that intransitivity was non-trivially associated with presents of this shape in the protolanguage. Chapter 4 brings to light new facts about the inflectional properties of dh-presents using evidence from Baltic, Slavic and Germanic. These languages suggest that dh-presents were athematic in the protolanguage, that they inflected using the h2e-conjugation endings and that they showed root ablaut. It is furthermore demonstrated that dh-presents stood in a special morphological relationship to i-presents in the protolanguage.

This dissertation constitutes the first comprehensive study of dh-presents. For this reason, the collection of primary source data, found here and nowhere else, and the references to relevant scholarly literature on a topic about which little has been written, have an intrinsic value for research on the verbal system of Indo-European. The conclusions that are ultimately drawn from this collection add to our reconstruction of the protolanguage an entirely new category of h2e-conjugation present that had until now been overlooked. This has consequences for the historical grammar of the individual daughter languages, for our understanding of the larger architecture of the Indo-European verbal system and for debates about the deeper history of voice morphology in pre-Proto-Indo-European. Finally, this case study on the history of a single morpheme constitutes a contribution to the field of historical morphology more generally, and especially to the study of valency from a diachronic perspective.