Re: [tied] Stative Verbs, or Perfect Tense

>
> I haven't made my mind up where it comes from. The first
> thought is to connect it to the Uralic possessive and verbal
> definite endings *-m&, *-t&, *-sa, which are quite plainly
> agglutinated personal pronouns. I don't think there can be
> any doubt that the PIE endings *-m, *-s have the same
> source, even if the exact course of events can be disputed
> (my view is that *-m and *-s [in fact *-mW and *-sW] reflect
> agglutinated *mu and *tu, where the second is the PIE 2nd.
> person pronoun, the first the basis for the oblique of the
> 1st. person pronoun [but the nom. has been replaced by
> *h1eg^]).
>
> If we have *m(w)e and *twe, then *swe, the 3rd. person
> reflexive, can reflect the development of a former 3rd.
> person pronoun *su. Its agglutination would lead directly
> to a 3rd. person marker *-s (*-sW). Note, however, that the
> Uralic and PIE forms cannot have a shared origin as
> _endings_: the 3 plural is *-sa-n in Uralic, it is *-en >
> *-er + *-s = *-ers (> *-r.s, *-é:r) in PIE. The order of
> the elements is inverted, and the *-s can only have been
> agglutinated in IE _after_ final *-n became *-r.
>
> The other option is that *-s is the agglutinated nominative
> of the demonstrative pronoun *so. If one thinks that the
> 3rd. person ending *-t represents the oblique base of the
> same pronoun (*to), the two endings *-s and *-t share a
> common origin. The reason why the 3rd. person subject of
> one set of forms (the present/imperfect) was marked by
> (non-nominative) *-t, while the other was marked by
> (nominative) *-s must remain obscure. It may have been the
> case that *-s marked a transitive subject, while *-t marked
> an intransitive subject, which would open a view on a stage
> where pre-PIE had ergative morphology. In any case, the
> ending *-t (plural *-en + *-t) was generalized in
> imperfective forms, with the suffix agglutinated before the
> soundlaw *-n > *-r, while perfective (aorist) forms had *-s
> (pl. *-en + *-s), agglutinated after the soundlaw *-n > *-r
> (*-er-s) [after the shift to accusative morphology?].
>

If the primary endings -m, -s, -t, -nt are not originally the
personal endings of a finite verb in a dependent clause, but the
possessive endings of a participle/gerund in a dependent
construction, then they should have a case ending of some kind to
mark their role in the main sentence, cf Finnish and other FU
languages.

A different solution:
*-t is not just non-negative, it's neuter too. The choice of *-s or
*-t might have to do with animacy of the subject.


Torsten