Momentary-Durative

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Due to the long break from reading this list, I am not sure if (and how
much) I am starting to repeat myself. Please forgive me if the two new posts
do contains little new information/question. It is just that I didn't see
them addressed.

Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen <jer at cphling.dk> wrote:

> I do not think the chain of reformulations is longer than many other
> stories generally accepted (or even as long as some known to be true). For
> the type _tuda'ti_, the key example itself has apparently replaced a nasal
> present still seen in tundate and Lat. tundo.

The tuda'ti type, with primary endings, is somewhat rare in RV. Perhaps,
tuda'ti type was a replacement for injunctives, i.e., tuda'ti was a general
present and not progressive present. Just a thought.

> Strunk has shown that nasal presents go with root aorists,

Reduplicated forms seem to go with root aorists as well. Anybody have info
on statistical comparisons between the two groups?

This also bears on the other proposal, going back to Kurylowicz at least,
for the origin of (asigmatic) aorist forms: namely, these are old preterits
that became limited to aorist function due to the rise of new presents.

Incidentally, what are your thoughts on the origin of nasal presents? The
rarity of infixes in PIE has led to the proposal that nasal presents
originated from a double affix, that is *wined- was really *wi-n-ed- (or
*wi-ne-d). This would mean that originally win(e)d- and w(e)id (or wide/o)
were not grammatically associated. In case of dehmi lehmi etc, it then
becomes a question of when the roots came into existence. I am not sure if
we have enough information to decide this.

This brings me to a general question. There seem to be two camps about the
category system of the PIE verb. One believes that the aorist-imperfect
distinction, to be equated to perfective-imperfective distinction,
``always'' existed in PIE and Hittie lost this distinction, while Vedic
changed things around. The other considers the aspectual distinction to
postdate the separation of Anatolian.

There are certain nagging questions about the first thesis: The change in
Vedic is not explained and how it came about without the prior loss of
aspect has, AFAIK, not been explained. Those who adhere to this also feel
the need to explain away as much as possible of root presents. But
there are enough of them remain in Hittite and Vedic to raise doubts.

Sigmatic aorists, as forming perfectives for root presents, present some
problems too. There are roots that look like older roots extended with an s.
This suggests that sigmatic aorists came from grammatization of a root
extention and fits in with the general opinion that sigmatic aorist as a
>grammatized< formation (as opposed to -s as derivational affix for forming
new verbs) is late PIE.

There is another question that typology suggests: There are basically two
forms of perfectives (Dahl, ``Tense and Aspect systems; Bybee and Dahl, in
Studies in Language, 13(1989) pp.51--103; Bybee et al ``The evolution of
grammar''): The first seems to come from old preterits that become limited
to perfectives due to the rise of new present/imperfective. The second is,
as in Russian, from ``bounders'', originally adverbs that denote the
attainment of a limit. In the first, aorist is unmarked and refers to action
considered as a whole, even if it is atelic. In the second, the perfective
does not fit that well with atelic events. The difference is said to be
evident in Bulgarian which has both the aorist-imperfect distinction (of the
first type) and perfective-imperfective distinction using prefixes (the
bounders).

Now, in PIE, some verbs seem to be like the first system (root aorist vs
marked presents) while we cannot escape the presence of the second type as
well (root present with sigmatic aorist). Sometimes Greek situation is used
to argue that aorist looks older due to the number of irregularities. But in
Sanskrit, as can be seen from looking at the lists in grammars, root
presents show the most irregularity while aorists (and class 3, 7
presents) are regular exemplars of internal sandhi however complicated the
rules may seem. Again we are faced with the question of who is more archaic
and who regularized.

One thing needs to be said about a different attempt to explain this, namely
the traditional (in IE studies) equation durative=atelic=imperfective,
momentary=perfective. Limiting perfectives to telic/momentary situations is
decidely the minority option among languages. In Dahl's survey it was found
only in Slavic, Finnish (based on acc vs partative), Japanese, Hindi,
Mandarin, Bandjalang and Cebuano. It is even absent in aorist-imperfect
distinction of Bulgarian. Positing this restriction for PIE requires
appropriately strong evidence, not just pointing to Russian.

The equation durative=telic is equally atypical. In such a language, one
could not just say ``John walked home'' or ``John ate one piece of bread''.
Instead one must say something like ``John walked, reached home'', or have
two verbs for every transitive durative, one used only for past with
definite objects, one used for past with indefinite/mass objects and for all
presents. Again, we cannot just assume such a property, especially given
that this does not seem all that common in contemporary languages.

>  for the functional change is quite small: it only takes the use
> of the aorist form as an imperfect, then the rest follows by itself.

The change of syntactic categories does not strike me as a small change. I
would like to know more about incontrovertable cases of such changes before
arriving at any conclusions.