Re: [tied] Stative Verbs, or Perfect Tense

> There's an idea I've been toying with for a long time, and
> perhaps the time is ripe for sharing it here. The late Polish

linguist

> Adam Weinberg once suggested, as an obiter dictum in a handbook of

IE

> morphology, that there may have been an early form of "perfect
> participle" -- a verbal adjective based on the bare reduplicated

stem

> without any suffixes. His original examples are just two: Hitt.

memal

> 'groats' < substantivised *mé-ml.h2 (or *mé-mo:l?) 'that has been
> ground', , and Lat. memor 'mindful, that reminds one (of sth.)';
> Weinberg connects the latter with *(s)mer- 'remember'. I wouldn't
> however exclude the analysis of <memor> as *mé-mr. (a variant of
> *mé-m(o)n- with final rhotacism), connecting it directly with the

root

> *men- and <memini:> (and Gk. Memn-o:n, for example). Of course I'm

aware

> of the "handbook" etymology of <memor> as *me-mn-us-, but how

about

> something more straightforward?
>
> My own addition to Weinberg's idea is the guess that the inanimate
> variant of the adjective originally had a passive meaning while

the

> animate one was active, and that the perfect itself is a denominal
> formation based on this "participle" (cf. the Slavic l-preterite).
>

If the perfect stem is a participle/verbal noun, the present stem
might be too. That would mean
1) the tematic vowel is a purely nominal suffix, not a mixed
nominal/verbal one.
2) the secondary present endings -m, -s, -t, -nt are possesive
suffixes that turn nouns, and therefore also this participle into
possessed ones, eg "my Verbing" etc; these are used in dependent
constructions (cf. the Finno-Ugric languages), later understood as
dependent clauses.
3) the so-called 'hic-et-nunc-particle' is just a plain locative
suffix which when added to the possessed participle/verbal noun
turns it into a locativic progressive gerund: "in my Verbing"
4) no copula exists; therefore: 'I (am) in-my-Verbing' is a main
clause.

Cf. Collinder: De uraliska språken
"In Proto-Uralic there was no hypotaxis in the strict sense.
Sentences were connected paratactically, and since there were no
conjunctions, it was the contents which determined the mutual
relations between sentences (clauses). In Proto-Uralic, as in the
present Uralic languages, verbal nouns of various contructions
corresponded to the dependent clauses of the Indo-European
languages..."

It seems PIE might have been in a similar situation.


Torsten