Momentary-Durative

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Mon, 12 Jul 1999, Vidhyanath Rao wrote:

  [snip of my (Jens') message]

> 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.

Hardly so, for the injunctive is not a stem-formation, but an inflectional
category that can be formed from all verbal stems.

> [Jens:]

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

> [VR:]

> Reduplicated forms seem to go with root aorists as well. [...]

Indeed they do, the percentage is _very_ high in both types. In other
words, the nasal and teh reduplicated present share the same aorist type,
and in fact they have another rival in the y-presents. I suppose
durativity could be of different kinds, e.g. duration, repetition, or a
mere attempt.

> 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.

If my observation that there is an alliance between the sk^-present type
and the s-aorist is correct, and the morpheme *-sk^e/o- is a development
of the expected *-s-ye/o- (implementing the "lengthening s" also known
from the nom.sg., which must earlier have been a different phoneme from
other sources of IE /s/), then the s-aorist was originally inchoative in
function. I'd say that makes very good sense, for the s-aor. is also
widely used with verbs that form radical or thematic presents, as
*weg^h-e/o- 'drive', whose aor. *we:g^h-s- will then originally have meant
'start driving, set out (by carriage)'.

> 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.

The double suffix theory has little to recommend it, and for some root
types the nasal-infix structure shows surprises that can only be
reasonably understood as the result of metathesis. Thus roots ending in
*-yH and *-Hy (the later being the "long diphthongs" like *dheH1y- 'suck')
both form nasal presents with the -y- before the nasal infix and the -H-
after it. The natural origin of an infix is of course either a prefix or a
suffix which got displaced and moved into the interior af an adjacent
morpheme by simple metathesis. The nasal infix is located before the final
root consonant, therefore it must have moved in from behind which makes it
an old suffix. I take it that a present-stem structure like *li-ne-{k}-,
*{kw}ri-ne-H2- and *dhi-ne'-H1- from *ley{kw}- 'leave', *{kw}reyH2- 'buy',
*dheH1y- 'suck' proceed from old structures in which /n/ was simply added
to the root, i.e.

   *ley{kw}-n-      *{kw}reyH2-n-     *dheH1y-n-,

and that these structures were subsequently adjusted to some more widely
"preferred syllable types" by simple metathesis, which apparently gave

   *leyn{kw}-       *{kw}reynH2-      *dheynH1-.

Then, as generally in IE, stems ending in three consonants were alleviated
by insertion of an /e/ before the last consonant (my own observation);
that gave:

    *leyne{kw}-     *{kw}reyneH2-     *dheyneH1-.

The new vowel took the accent, so that the strong forms acquired a span
/-ne'-/; on that basis, the weak form which had syllabic endings, moved
the accent one slot further, leaving /-n-/. The product was then:

3sg *li-ne'-{kw}-t  *{kw}ri-ne'-H2-t  *dhi-ne'-H1-t
3pl *li-n-{kw}-e'nt *{kw}ri-n-H2-e'nt *dhi-n-H1-e'nt.

> 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 these two camps, yes, and I am in no doubt that camp one is
right. There is no way the specific forms of the aspect stems could have
been formed secondarily in "the rest of IE" left after the exodus of (or
from) the Anatolians. At the very least, all the _forms_ must be assigned
to a protolanguage from which also Anatolian is descended. And what would
the forms be there for, if the functions that go with them only developed
later? We find practically all the IE verbal stems in Anatolian, many only
in a few lexicalized remains; are we to assume they have had totally
enigmatic earlier functions, and that they were later dug up by "the rest
of IE" and given totally new functions there? Clearly the only unforced
interpretation is that their functions in the common protolanguage were
the ones with which they are found where they do survive with a palpable
functional identity.

> 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.

I don't follow - what change in Vedic are you talking about? Why would
anyone want to explain away root presents where they are securely
reconstructible? One would do that only to avoid having a language
combining a root-present with a root-aorist, for in that case the two
aspect stems are identical. That is why I am so sceptical about the
authenticity of the Vedic root presents lehmi and dehmi, because for these
verbs we have nasal presents in some other IE languages pointing to the
existence of a root aorist; thus leh- deh- look like displaced aorists.
But not so for eti 'goes' or asti 'is': these are durative verbs, and so
their unmarked form could function as a durative (socalled "present")
stem.

> 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.

If my wild guess analyzing the inchoative present suffix *-sk^e/o- as
**-z-ye/o- (with a special sibilant, whence later IE /s/) is correct,
there is no way this could belong to any period we would call "late". I
don't expect everybody to accept this idea, however (though I don't see
why they shouldn't).

> 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.

Again, I do not think there is any problem in accepting root present as
original for inherently durative verbs, and root aorist as equally
original for inherently punctual verbs.

> 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.

But the IE aorist is not restricted to any special kind of verbs - it is
only _unmarked_ (better: apparently originally unmarked) for inherently
punctual verbs; for other verbs the aorist need a morphological marking,
and the meaning is then some nuance that can be regarded as punctual
("started to -") or it just reports that the action got done (Meillet's
action pure et simple). One important functional point with the aorist,
however, is that it marks a turn of events which creates a new situation,
whereas the "present aspect" stays in the situation already given and
reports another action contributing to that situation. This is seen
remarkably well in the prohibitive use of the prs. vs. aor. injunctive, as
propounded so clearly by Hoffmann.

> 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.

Still, even verbs generally signifying completed action could form
duratives, indicating e.g. a repetition of the action (give one thing, and
then another) or an as yet unsuccessful attempt (I'm opening the window).

[Jens:]

>> 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.

We know that this kind of change was small enough in the languages here
concerned to lead to a number of misplaced aspect stems. E.g., the
Armenian aor. eber is an old ipf. Is the jump from "narrative past" to
"recent past" so great? If it is, even great changes happen.

Jens