The diachrony of participles in the (pre)history of Greek and Hittite

Abstract

This article discusses two case studies of diachronic “voice flipping” in which the syntax of a participle appears to change from active or “subject-oriented” to passive (Ancient Greek ‑menos to Modern Greek ‑menos) and from resultative/stative to active (Proto-Indo-European *-nt-; Hittite ‑ant‑ vs. Ancient Greek ‑nt‑). While the first type of change is the result of a diachronic reanalysis by which a functional projection (VoiceP) is lost, the second type in fact adds an active Voice head. Both changes are the result of the simultaneous availability of a stative and an eventive reading in deverbal adjectival forms and could belong to a larger “participle cycle”. However, unlike in other changes usually discussed under the label “cycle”, unidirectional economy principles do not apply in these cases. Rather, these cases provide evidence that some types of morphosyntactic change, especially those related to event and argument structure, are driven by reanalysis of the feature content of functional heads under local structural ambiguity.

Directionality in cross-categorial derivations

“…suggests that the issue is not just derivational complexity, but the presence vs. This could be taken to suggest that there are structural differences in the height of attachment, or selectional properties of these different affixes (Anagnostopoulou 2003;Harley 2009;Alexiadou et al 2015;Alexiadou 2017;Grestenberger 2020;Iordăchioaia 2020;Ahdout 2021). Assuming that the zero nominalizer attaches to the root or a low verbalizing projection (v, Res) predicts that it will never compete with "higher" nominalizers like -ation and -ing which select a larger amount of functional structure, and hence that it will also not be compatible with verbal argument structure.…”

“…To conclude, this case study shows that categorizers (if defined as "low-" or "root-attaching" v, n, etc.) can diachronically turn into zero categorizers, given sufficient time (and sound changes), but also that the selectional properties of these categorizers can change over time, independent of whether or not they are zero, as in the Vedic ti-stems in (78), the rise of deverbal noun formation by conversion in English (Kastovsky 1985), the development of the deverbal noun-forming suffixes -ing/-ung in English and German (Iordăchioaia & Werner 2019), and the development of the participial suffixes in Greek (Grestenberger 2020). Finally, establishing that…”