Re: [tied] Stative Verbs, or Perfect Tense

--- 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.

Offhand, there is also dez^doN : dádha:mi. And *sind-e- has of
course replaced *si-sd-e-. But this is without relevance.

> >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.

But I certainly would if they had then retained the reduplication.
Is that a possibility you do not even consider?

> >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.

Reduplication may well be retained in verbs like haitan haihait for
the simple reason that it mattered to tell the stems apart. ON aka
ók could still do with reduplication, and its result could be
analogically transferred to (Goth.) faran fo:r, but there was no
place in the phonotactic system for a stem *ho:it-. Do I sense an
attitude of consistent disregard for the obvious?

> >> 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.

Oh, you insist? Well so can I: Many athematic verbs have become e-
or je- verbs in Slavic, why not this one?

>
> 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))?

I am in no position to answer that question in a way you would take
seriously.

Jens