From: Torsten
Message: 65385
Date: 2009-11-08
>I don't think I will do that, since I need the verb root or stem to be nominal for another reason, namely that I believe the personal endings are originally deictic demonstratives, *-n,W-, -s- and -t-, "at me", "at thee", and "at him", occurring elsewhere as deictic adverbs *nu, *sa, *ta, as such they need the stem they attach to to be nominal.
> --- 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 theI disagree. 'Away' modifies the *verb* 'run' to the composite verb 'run away', the gerund of which is 'running away', it doesn't modify 'running' directly like 'heavy' modifies 'drinking', the gerund of 'drink'.
> 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 _thinkingAs above.
> carefully_.