Marking of quality modifiers in 2nd-generation IE languages

• Artemij Keidan ^[1]
  1. [1] Università de Roma La Sapienza

     Università de Roma La Sapienza

     Roma Capitale, Italia

     
• Localización: Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, ISSN 1732-0747, ISSN-e 1897-7499, Vol. 56, Nº. 3, 2020 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Morpho-syntactic isoglosses in Indo-European: Diachrony, typology and linguistic areas), págs. 477-527
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In PIE, quality modifiers were expressed by stative verbs and nominal epithets, rather than by special adjectival lexemes. Adjectives did not form a separate lexical class. This made the encoding of the NP constituency less explicit. If we consider what I suggest calling “second-generation IE languages” we can observe a general tendency to create new, more explicit morphological means of dependency marking within a NP. The exact outcomes of this diachronic process vary from one language to another. However, if we parametrise the variation, a common pattern becomes clearly observable. In all the languages analysed in the present paper, there is a pronoun undergoing grammaticalisation as a dependency marker. What varies is (1) the position of this element with respect to the nominal base (pre- vs. postposed); (2) the degree of agglutination (bound morpheme vs. clitic vs. free morpheme); and (3) the locus of marking (head vs. modifier vs. double or alternant marking); (4) the source morpheme that undergoes grammaticalisation (relative vs. demonstrative pronoun).