Re: PIE Word Formation (2)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> Nomina (ctd.)
>
> Contrastive accent and secondary full grades
>
> Substantives tend to be distinguished from related adjectives by
> means of contrastive accent. The phenomenon can be illustrated with
> such pairs as *bHór-o-s 'load, burden' : *bHor-ó- 'carrying', both
> from the root *bHer- 'carry'). Note that in this case we are not
> dealing with straightforward substantivisation -- there is a
> diathetic contrast between the agentive meaning of the adjective and
> the passive/resultative meaning of the noun ('something carried');
> agent nouns like *bHor-ó-s 'carrier' are not distinguished from
> adjectives. Feminine abstracts are accented on the thematic element
> (*bHor-á-h2) irrespective of whether the focus is on an activity
> ('act of carrying') or the corresponding state ('being carried,
> motion').

I agree here, and would like to add that the contrastive accent may be
partially attributable to prosodic factors.

> The unstressed o-vocalism of the *bHor-ó-/*bHor-áh2- type has been
> exhaustively treated by Jens Rasmussen, who was kind enough to
> present a convenient summary here:
>
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/30940

Regrettably, I cannot agree with Jens' theory at the present time.
Instead, I currently favor an alternative hypothesis whereby the
o-vocalism in the root comes from the pitch accent of that stage of
IE. The idea is that, first of all, IE's accentuation had weakened
from being stress-based to being pitched-based (or, at the very least,
had shifted from stress-timed prosody to syllable-timed). At this
point, the ablautend vowel had not yet differentiated into its
qualitative grades. Therefore, the addition of the (originally
genitive) adjectival suffix *-ó(s) resulted in the accent shifting to
the suffix. The resulting low pitch on the root vowel lead to its
later realization as *o, not *e.

> The tendency to use contrastive accent must have operated throughout
> the history of PIE and into the early "dialectal" stages. Several
> chronological layers can be discerned. To begin with the oldest,
> there was a time when accent retraction to a formerly unaccented
> syllable caused the appearance of a full vowel there, while the
> syllable that had lost its accent was phonetically reduced.

Hmm. With all due respect, I fail to see how a full vowel could
reappear after it had been lost. Perhaps this is shortsightedness on
my part, however -- if so, please let me know.

> In particular, thematic *-o- became *-u-. Let us imagine a root like
> *kret- (a real example, with the approximate meaning of
> 'strengthen'. The addition of anaccented adjectival suffix like
> *-ró- forms a verbal adjective: *krt-ró- 'strengthened',
> dissimilated to *krt-ó-.

To me, this does not necessarily follow. Could it be possible, at
least, for the form in question to derive from *krt-ó-? Obviously,
the *-tó- participle cannot be used here, for we would then see
*krstó- in IE outside of Indo-Iranian.

> Accent retraction produces the noun *krét-u-s 'being strong, power'.
> Note that the full vowel is inserted where it belongs, which means
> that at that stage speakers were aware of the underlying vocalism of
> the root: perhaps the actual realisation of the weak grade at that
> time was *kr&t-, with an appreciable (even if reduced) vowel. Later
> an adjective was formed from *krét-u- by another application of the
> principle of contrastive accent, this time yielding *kr.t-ú- (at a
> time when a stressed zero grade was already possible, but loss of
> accent still caused vowel reduction).

How likely do you think it is that the speakers would be aware of the
"underlying vocalism of the root"? It seems more likely to me that
*krét-u-s simply contains a suffix *-u. The end-stressed adjective,
then, would seem to come from later prosodic factors, namely the
rising intonation between an adjective and its head noun, resulting in
a tendency for adjectives to be oxytone.

> More recently, a similar scenario was re-enacted. From the root noun
> *djeu- 'the bright sky, heaven' it's possible to derive thematic
> *diw-ó- 'belonging to heaven, celestial', and then (on the analogy
> of nouns like *krétu-) *déiw-o-s 'celestial being, deity'. Here the
> vowel was inserted in the _wrong_ place, since the weak grade *diw-,
> with the unstressed vowel reduced to zero, had become ambiguous. PIE
> speakers had the same difficulty with other *CREC roots, which often
> developed secondary full grades of the form *CERC. Note also that
> the post-tonic reduction of the thematic vowel was no longer
> obligatory at the stage in question. However, qualitative ablaut was
> still productive, so when a new adjective of belonging was formed
> from *déiw-o-s, it took the form of *[deiwo-]-ó- --> *diwi-ó-
> 'belonging to the gods, divine, heavenly' (Skt. divyá-, Gk. di^os <
> *diwios). Still later, another contrastive accent shift produced
> another adjective without causing any segmental effects: *deiw-ó-
> 'divine'.

I'm afraid I cannot respond to this effectively without more
information. If I may ask, where are the different forms attested?

> The most recent layer contains cases like *mr.-tó- 'dead' vs.
> *mr.'-to- 'murder (PGmc. *murDa-) or RV krs.n.á- 'black' vs.
> kr.'s.n.a- 'blackness; a kind of dark antelope' or Kr's.n.a- (the
> god).

I would agree that, in the last stage(s) of IE, any vocalic phoneme
could receive the accent. It also seems to me that the contrastive
accent was a relatively recent feature within IE.

- Rob