Search results for " Indo-European languages"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Linguistic Analysis and Ancient Indo-European Languages
2015
Using modern linguistic theory to describe ‘dead’ languages is one of the theoretical and methodological challenges in contemporary linguistic research. In fact, theories of the twentieth century mostly aimed to account for speakers’ linguistic competence, thus basing their analysis on live speakers and their intuitions. However, drawing on evidence from languages such as Vedic, Greek, Latin, Hittite, Gothic, Celtic and Proto-Indo-European itself, the relevance of the ancient Indo-European languages to contemporary linguistic theory has been constantly shown, since the rise of the linguistic sciences in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the observation of ancient Indo-European language…
Perspectives on Language and Linguistics
2021
The scientific interests of Lucio Melazzo have been addressed to diverse research fields, from ancient to modern Indo-European languages, from etymology to formal syntax, from history of linguistics to studies on ancient Greek philosophers. On occasion of his retirement from his university activities, we have decided to offer him this volume, which gathers the contributions of many distinguished scholars who have accepted to participate in this project. We appreciate that the variety of the book contents reflects the variety of Lucio Melazzo’s own interests.
A particular coordination structure of Indo-European flavour
2005
The article aims to account for the various, often unexpected positions of the conjunction in coordinated constructions of ancient Indo-European languages, among them Hittite, Ancient Greek, Latin and Vedic Sanskrit. The coordination possibilities of ancient Indo-European languages are derived from the binary branching hypotheses of Universal Grammar, with the result that not only seemingly idiosyncratic facts of a number of languages receive a principled explanation, but also a speculative hypothesis of Universal Grammar receives empirical support; ancient Indo-European languages realize possibilities that are derivable from the Munn-Kayne theory but have not been attested so far.
The role of lexical aspect in constructing Proto-Indo-European verbal paradigms
2009
The aim of this paper is to recover the role of the [± telic] inherent feature of PIE verbal roots, regardless of the many different meanings which derived verbs could take depending on their combination with arguments, adverbials, and so on. Semantic changes due to different contexts could have indeed obscured the relationship between the original lexical aspect of a verb and the structure of its morphological paradigm. The aspectual class is often described as a compositional property, and verbs are even analyzed as complex structures made up of completely neutral roots without any information about their argument structure. However, the distribution and the kind of forms within the parad…