L. I. Kulikov. Voices and valency-changing categories in Indo-Aryan and Proto-Indo- European: A diachronic typological portrait of the Vedic verbal system (pp. 527–552)

Author

L. I. Kulikov (Ghent University)

Keywords\n diachronic typology, transitivity, Indo-European, Indo- Aryan, middle voice, passive voice, causative

Pages\n 527–552

Summary\n

The present paper concentrates on the analysis of transitivity oppositions and valency-changing categories in Indo-Aryan and Indo- European in a diachronic typological perspective. Such analysis of the reflexes of the transitivity markers and oppositions reconstructed for Proto- Indo-European uncovers a few basic types of development attested in daughter languages. On the one hand, several groups, including most Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, replace the old syncretic marker of the valency-reducing categories, the middle type of inflexion, with a new middle morpheme, mostly going back to the Proto-Indo-European (quasi-)reflexive form *s(u)e-. A number of Romance and Germanic languages attest the emergence and expansion of labile syntax (cf. English open, change, break); the expansion of labile verbs is also attested in Greek. The Proto-Indo-European causative morpheme *-eie-, still well-preserved in Gothic jan-verbs and Old Church Slavonic i-causatives, has left only few traces in modern Germanic and Slavonic languages. This type of evolution, well-attested in the Western part of the Indo-European area, might be called ‘syncretic’. On the other hand, some other daughter languages – in particular, a number of Eastern branches of Indo-European – radically abandon the syncretic strategy and develop special markers for several intransitive derivations. These include, in particular, Indo-Aryan and Armenian markers of morphological passive going back to the Proto-Indo-European suffix *-ie/o-; Old Indo-Aryan reflexive pronouns tan - (originally meaning ‘body’) and ātmán- (‘breath’); Indo-Iranian reciprocal pronouns. Furthermore, morphological causatives become productive in some Eastern branches, in Armenian and Indo-Iranian. These processes go parallel with the degrammaticalization of the Proto-Indo-European middle, which, albeit physically preserved in the paradigm, loses most of its grammatical intransitivizing functions. This diachronic type can be labeled ‘antisyncretic’.

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