Origin of Root Extensions (was: hunt)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:

> > To me they look like postfixes corresponding to old postpositions;

> For that to happen, verb roots would have to be also nominal, which I actually think they were, ie so that the root could also function as a participle, but if the extensions were postpositions then an extended verb stem would be a postpositional phrase, ie. a kind of adverb, and that won't work, since the verb root and the verb stem must be of the same syntactic category.

Then for 'postpositions' read adverbs overlapping with adpositions. (Shouldn't that be 'appositions'?) After all, the 'pre' in _preposition_ originally referred to the rôle as a verbal prefix.

> If we have to explain the extensions as traces of a periphrastic construction, and if we believe the verb root was once a verbal noun, the extension would have to be an old adjective.

No. In English, gerunds can be qualified by adjectives or modified by adverbs - _heavy drinking_ v. _running away_. Sometimes we can have either - _careful thinking_ and _thinking carefully_.

Richard.