Re: [tied] Stative Verbs, or Perfect Tense

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 16:30:06 +0000, elmeras2000
<jer@...> wrote:

>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
>
>>[]
>> Reduplication is practically unknown in Slavic (I can only
>> think of dad- "give" and (Im-)e-om- > jIma~m- "have"), which
>> I suppose can be interpreted as a sign that reduplication
>> was simply eliminated across the board. In Hittite,
>> however, Jasanoff has me convinced (pqpf. wewakk-) that this
>> canot be the whole story there.
>
>Sure, reduplication was not lost where it has been retained. You
>just said the same for Slavic.

No, I claimed that in Slavic, reduplication has been
completely lost for all practical purposes. *dad- only
represents reduplication in the mind of a historical
linguist, *imam- I guess not even that (only for some).
If redupication were still an active or recognizable feature
in Slavic, you wouldn't be able to claim that bod-oN,
bor-joN and mel-joN are intensives.

>The story of Hitt. wewakk- is exactly
>like that of German beben which corresponds to the pluperfect
>structure of Ved. ábibhet 'feared', old preterite made ot go with
>the perfect bibhá:ya. It would be an unwarranted stretch of the
>probative force of the evidence to take beben as proof that
>preterites like kam, nahm, war etc. have never been reduplicated, or
>even as proof that they do not reflect the IE perfect.

I actually *do* think those forms were never reduplicated.
Unlike Slavic, reduplication was never lost in Germanic (at
least Gothic). But we only see reduplication in verbs with
o-vocalism (also e:, o:), i.e. in the real statives, where
reduplication must somehow be posited for the proto-language
(the perfect has it, and so does Hitt. wewakk-: even so,
class VI verbs (Goth. slahan slo:h) have o-grade and no
reduplication, as does the Hittite hi-conjugation, so
redupliation is not a necessary feature of stative verbs).
For verbs with e-grade in the root, presumably largely
active verbs, which only formed a perfect _tense_
secondarily, it is not necessary to assume they ever had
reduplication in (pre-)Germanic. It would not have been
lost in Gothic.

>> Incidentally, I find your 3pl. *mél-mlH-nti (and Jasanoff's
>> *mélH-nti, I suppose) incongruent with both of yours
>> derivation of the present forms of BS ê/i-verbs (ultimately
>> based on 3pl. -inti). The o-grade verbs in Slavic have
>> either -e- (bo``doN, bodetI', bodoNtI', a.p. c) or -je-
>> (borjoN', bo'rjetI, bo'rjoNtI, a.p. b), but never -i-.
>
>Many athematic verbs have become e- or je- verbs in Slavic, why not
>this one?

Sorry, I changed the subject there. My point was that they
were athematic and acrostatic in Balto-Slavic. Their 3pl.
ended in PBS *-inti, with, to quote Jasanoff, "an *-i- that
was morphologically reanalysed as a stem vowel and
generalized to all persons and numbers". Except that it
_didn't_ happen here.

To change the subject yet again. This just occurred to me:
can it be that the Vedic "aorist passive" (ábodhi) contains
the fientive/essive *-eh1(i)- in zero grade (*bhóudh-h1(i))?


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...