Buch, Englisch, Band 01, 240 Seiten
A study of how relic forms in languages serve as source material for analogical extension
Buch, Englisch, Band 01, 240 Seiten
Reihe: LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics
ISBN: 978-3-89586-101-7
Verlag: LINCOM
1) The 1sg -m marker, limited to five athematic verbs in Late Common Slavic, now marks many or all verbs in some Slavic languages. Reconstruction of relevant verbal systems shows how phonological changes facilitated the abduction that the athematic verbs had a prototypical stem structure, promoting the spread of their characteristic morpheme.
2) The ?-stem declension was lost in Late Common Slavic, but its endings survived, spread paradigmatically (motivated by parallels in other paradigms), or semantically to create new distinctions. The latter mark items high and low (but not mid-range) on the FIGURE-GROUND scale, a hierarchy of distinctions crucial to the development of animacy.
3) The dual number was lost in most of Slavic, but some endings have become productive as markers of plural or virile (the latter also motivated by FIGURE-GROUND).