--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Christopher Culver
<christopher_culver@...> wrote:
> Szeremenyi, in his "Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics",
writes that
> syntax is one of the most uncertain and contentious areas of IE
study.
Well, if syntax is one area, there are not many areas, and then each
of them is "one of the most uncertain and contentious areas of IE
study", since they are only being compared to each other. In
phonology all must agree that there were /p t k, d g, bh dh gh, r l
m n, s/, but some won't have /k^, g^, g^h/ while others will rather
do away with /kW, gW, gWh/, and some won't have /b/, and the
laryngeals have enemies all over the place hwn it comes ot details.
In Morphology, everyone must agree that there was a neuter and a non-
neuter, but not all will have the non-neuter be subdivided into
masculine and feminine in PIE already; everybody must accept the
existence of the nom., acc., gen., dat., instr., loc., and the
vocative, while some may find the position of the ablative
precarious, and for some of the actual forms there is widespread
disagreement. The existence of verbal aspect stems opposing an
aorist to a durative (present) is perhaps not universally accepted,
given the absence of the opposition in Anatolian. The existence of
active personal endings, with a primary and a secondary subset, will
be quite geenrally accepted, but the corresponding middle-voice
endings are combined with those of the perfect by some in such a way
that neither the middle, nor the perfect or indeed the hi-
conjugation can be unanimously ascribed to PIE. The moods are
perhaps not accepted by those who stake everything on Anatolian, so
we have only the indicative, the injunctive and the imperative. This
list is proof that there is widespread disagreement over many
fundamental points of a purely descriptive nature in PIE, and even
more about what to make of it.
On that background I do not think syntax is any worse off than
phonology or inflectional morphology. What the cases arfe basically
there for appears to be above dispute, while there is much dispute
about details. Most of the cases of syntactic subordination of the
daughter languages originate from coordination (paratax) and do not
go back to the protolanguage as the syntactic constructions we see.
What other hypotactic constructions there may have been, is hard to
tell. Lehmann says there were particles, but he can't reconstruct
them; he is adamant the augment was *not* there, although he can
easily reconstruct that. If the moods are accepted for PIE, quite a
lot can be said about them, but if they were not there it won't be
missed; the same goes for the aspects. Since there are interrogative
and relative pronouns, there must have been interrogative and
relative sentences, the latter certainly demanding some amount of
subordination. But now I'm beginning to reason.
There is of course fierce disagreement over word order which has
come to enjoy such prominent attention. However Wackernagel's
position of enclitics (second place) seems uncontested. The unmarked
position of the verb appears to be final; it is its unmarked
position in Indo-Iranian and Italic, the only non-initial position
it can occupy in Old Irish, and just about its only position in
Tocharian and Anatolian. But everything can be foregrounded by being
put first, and any additional afterthought can come after the final
word of the clause proper. That allows all the structures we find in
the attested languages to start from somewhere. But now I am
reasoning again.
> Lehmann, however, asserts in his "Theoretical Bases of Indo-
European
> Linguistics" that syntax has been essentially figured out and
there's nothing
> left to uncover. So, I ask a linguist experienced in this to let
me know what
> to believe.
>
> I'd also be grateful for any opinions on the Lehmann book. He
seems quite sure
> of himself and sets as unarguable fact matters that are portrayed
as more
> uncertain in other works.
You are very right on that point. Lehmann seems above the use of
arguments. To me that means that we are not given any particular
reason to believe what he says. It is as if the evidence for the
structure of PIE lies outside of Indo-European. Lehmann has seen
interesting structures in Japanese, Turkish, Salish and Georgian,
and he goes out of his way to style some ambiguous forms or
structures in IE as indications of a bit of the same. On that basis
he opens the gates for a brass band blasting away on a monotonous
tune hailing the strucures he has come to love, now as Indo-European
or Pre-Indo-European. I don't think Brugmann and Delbrück would have
got away with that. Still, I credit Lehmann with the discovery of
the laryngeal-based origin of the Germanic Verschärfung.
Jens