Indo-European Inroads into the Syntactic-Etymological Interface: A Reconstruction of the PIE verbal root *menkʷ- ‘to be short; to lack’ and its Argument Structure

Michael Frotscher; Guus Kroonen; Jóhanna Barðdal

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Indo-European Inroads into the Syntactic-Etymological Interface: A Reconstruction of the PIE verbal root *menkʷ- ‘to be short; to lack’ and its Argument Structure

Michael Frotscher ^[1] ; Guus Kroonen ^[2] ; Jóhanna Barðdal ^[3]
1. [1] University of Cologne
  
  University of Cologne
  
  Kreisfreie Stadt Köln, Alemania
2. [2] Leiden University
  
  Leiden University
  
  Países Bajos
3. [3] Ghent University
  
  Ghent University
  
  Arrondissement Gent, Bélgica
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Localización: Historische Sprachforschung = Historical linguistics, ISSN 0935-3518, Vol. 133, Nº. 1, 2020, págs. 62-96
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- In this article we report a previously unidentified verbal root for the Indo- European protolanguage, *menkʷ- ‘to be short; to lack’, based on verbal and nominal reflexes in Italic, Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Tocharian and Anatolian, founded, we claim, in the Caland System, an archaic stratum of the Proto-Indo-European derivational system. In four of five Indo-European subgroups, predicates are found occurring with a subject(-like) argument in a non-nominative case, dative in the languages that have retained the Indo- European case morphology, but an oblique case in the branches where different non-nominative forms have merged. The documented verbal forms cannot be unified into a single reconstructable verb, yet we argue that the more abstract argument structure construction involving a dative subject(-like) argument must be inherited from Proto-Indo-European. Hence, we suggest a partial reconstruction for the grammar of Proto-Indo-European, based on the attested Tocharian form, *m(e)nkʷ-MP, the non-nominative case of the subject(- like) argument, and the meaning ‘lack’. Taken together, this cumulative evidence corroborates the assumption that a verb meaning ‘lack’ developed from ‘be short’ in the proto-language, indeed instantiating a non-canonically case-marked argument structure with its subject(-like) argument in the dative case.