The Development of Prefixation in Time and Space

Abstract

The paper argues that seemingly aberrant phonological developments of local adverbs that have become prepositions and verbal and nominal prefixes in Baltic, Germanic and Armenian are to be explained by the assumption of a phase of ‘ditropic’ behaviour: ‘ditropic clitics’ select as their prosodic host any stressed word preceding their syntactic host without forming a semantic unit. This enclitic behaviour of forms that in the historically attested stages of Baltic, Germanic and Armenian are prepositions and verbal and nominal prefixes is argued to explain their seemingly aberrant phonological developments: the shortening of Lithuanian (preverbal) nu‐ and pri‐ beside (prenominal) núo‐ and príe‐ due to Leskien's law, the operation of Verner's law in Proto‐Germanic *ga‐ beside residual *ham‐ from Proto‐Indo‐European *kom‐ and of Verner's law or assimilatory voicing in Proto‐Gmc *du‐, and the behaviour of the Armenian prepositions / prefixes betraying word‐internal position e.g. in the reduction of the affricate /dz/ to /z/ in Arm z‐. After the local adverbs passed through a phase of ditropic behaviour in all three proto‐languages, the mismatch between prosody and morphosyntax was resolved by a ‘prosodic jump’, phonologically attaching the local adverbs to their semantic and syntactic hosts.