The Germanic First Class of Weak Verbs

NOWELE, 1990

NOWELE, 1992

Some aspects of the restructuring of the Germanic verb system The aim of this contribution is a comparison of the ProtoGmc. — or, simply, Germanic (Gmc.) — verbal system with the state of affairs we can reconstruct for the common PIE ancestor, in order to ascertain how conservative or innovative Gmc. has been. I will first deal with some considerations concerning reduplication in the PIE and then I will focus on the Gmc. verb system. More generally: What role does reduplication in its broadest meaning play in the Gmc. languages? Along with reduplication, preverbs are the other elements which can occur in front of the verb. They will be considered firstly from the PIE perspective and then from the Gmc. one, looking for possible differences in their use and function. The aspectual function of preverbs and/or adpositions (i.e. separable preverbs) will be compared with similar syntactic strategies in other ancient IE languages. Finally, the ablauting Gmc. system will be considered and compared with its PIE ancestor. Some general conclusions will be drawn from the comparison with the reconstructed system as well as the verbal systems attested in the ancient IE languages, which sometimes developed different typological strategies. It will be shown that Gmc. offers very conservative as well as very innovative features. The topics I am going to deal with are among the subjects proposed by the organizers of the Montreal workshop. The first topic I want to discuss is the systematization and functionalization of the ablaut in the Germanic (Gmc.) verb system. Connected to this problem are two other points which I will touch upon later, namely the loss of reduplication in the verbal system with the development of a weak preterit and the high number of unetymologized Gmc. lexemes. As a matter of fact, the ablaut also concerns a number of Gmc. verbs lacking a plausible IE etymology, as well as late loanwords such as OE scrīfan, OHG scrīban, OFrs. skrīva, OSwed. skriva " to write ". Thus the overarching problem is: how innovative and/or conservative is the Gmc. verb system?

2010

This paper deals with one of the oldest and most controversial problems in the historical morphology of the Germanic branch of Indo-European: the origin and historical development of the so-called ‘weak preterite’. In Germanic, the weak preterite is the only means of forming the preterite tense of a derived verb. In spite of two hundred years of research into the weak preterite and a large number of hypotheses concerning its origin, it is not even securely established how the inflectional endings of this formation should be reconstructed for the common prehistory of the attested Germanic languages. Traditionally the inflectional endings of the weak preterite are conceived of as reflecting free inflectional forms of the verb “do”, only recently having been grammaticalized as inflectional morphology for derived verbs. But it has never been possible to identify the inflectional forms in question satisfactorily within the paradigm of “do”. This paper reconsiders the evidence of the Germanic daughter languages by taking into account West Germanic irregularities previously neglected or viewed as irrelevant. It is shown that the West Germanic evidence provides a key to understanding the origin and the later developments of the weak preterite inflectional endings.

This monograph attempts a new historical and comparative analysis of Old English (OE) preterite-present verbs. Preterite-present verbs show morphological peculiarities: their present singular typically exhibits the o-grade radical vocalism, to conform with the preterite singular of a strong verb, whilst their preterite is augmented with a dental suffix, which accords with the preterite formation of a weak verb. Traditionally, English and Germanic philologists have construed these characteristics as the result of an original o-grade perfect having been reinterpreted as the new present, along with the suppression of the original e-grade present, and of the Germanic (Gmc.) dental or weak preterite having been newly adopted for the preterite formation; this standpoint may be labelled the ‘strong verb origin’ theory. The present work calls this view into question by focusing on the difficulties inherent in this conventional approach. Authentic Indo-European comparative linguistic studies have considered that (the present tense formations of) the OE or Gmc. preterite-present verbs are reflexes of the archaic Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stative perfects, though the dental preterites are an independently Germanic innovation. Whilst this understanding, which may be dubbed the ‘stative perfect origin’ theory, seems to provide a far better explanation than the ‘strong verb origin’ theory, there also remain several significant issues to be resolved. First, how did the Gmc. preterite-present verbs lose their original reduplication if they go back to the PIE perfect? Second, does the Indo-European comparative evidence guarantee that all the preterite-present verbs unequivocally refer back to a PIE stative perfect alone? Third, how can the third person plural ending *-un in the present tense formation of the Gmc. preterite-present verb be explained, given that the third person plural termination of the PIE perfect should develop into *-ur in Germanic? Fourth, which PIE formation should the peculiar morphology of the infinitive of a Gmc. preterite-present verb reflect? This monograph claims that these important problems are not resolved if we merely assume that the PIE stative perfect continued into the Gmc. preterite-present by losing its original reduplication due to morphological haplology. These matters are interconnected to a remarkable extent, and a systematic account can be offered only if we recognize that the OE or Gmc. preterite-present verbs are in essence a historical product within the Germanic branch, resulting from the morphological conflation of the PIE stative perfect active and a PIE athematic present tense middle formation which can convey a present stative meaning; this perspective may be tagged as the ‘morphological conflation’ theory. This monograph adopts the ‘h2e-conjugation theory’ advocated recently by Jay H. Jasanoff and demonstrates that the same theory, remarkable in the very high level of explanatory power it achieves in treating the origin of the Anatolian ḫi-conjugation verbs, is also effective when attempting to give a historical account of the present tense formation of the OE or Gmc. preterite-present verbs. The core members of the preterite-present group have arisen from what is called a PIE stative-intransitive system within the framework of the h2e-conjugation theory, whilst there are also other preterite-present members which to some extent deviate from this pattern. In this way, the present work focuses on the historical and comparative analysis of the present tense formation of the preterite-present verb; accordingly, the origin and development of the Germanic dental preterite, another important issue concerning preterite-present morphology, is left open for future research.

Studies in Language Companion Series, 2013

Diachronica, 1994

Reviewed by MICHAEL WEISS, Yale University Kenneth Shields' new book follows firmly in the footsteps of his 1982 work, Indo-European Noun Inflection: A developmental history. As in that work, S offers a number of theories concerning the origin and evolution of various PIE categories and morphemes. And, as in that work, he does not maintain that his views are the only correct ones, but only one possible reconstruction out of a set of many conceivable and perhaps equally valid reconstructions. In the first part of the Chap.l (pp. 1-10), S sketches out his views on the methods of historical linguistics and responds to critics of his earlier work. On p.2, S writes that "historical linguistics appears to have its own constraints problem [...] diachronic theory and methodology are too powerful in the sense that they permit too many explanations of the same data." This is undeniably true. But, although S spends a few pages discussing the evaluation of reconstructions (4-10), he does not consider that historical linguistics has always had a rough and ready metric for the evaluation of competing accounts: the critical comparison of these accounts with regard to their descriptive adequacy and simplicity. In order for S to convince the reader that his own novel views are more likely than, or even as likely as, the communis opinio, he would have to show that they do, in fact, account for all the data just as well and involve no more steps or supplementary unproven hypotheses. One finds, however, that this vital work of critical comparison is left to the reader or to earlier scholars from whom S quotes extensively. For example, on p.46, in dealing with the origin of the Germanic rpreterites, S dismisses the widely held theory that they are relics of originally reduplicated perfects by quoting two rather weak objections from Lehmann (1952: 57) that "there is no evidence that any [...] verb forms [in these dialects] developed from reduplicated forms like *spespume", and that "the dissimilations are unusual". But Germanic clearly inherited reduplicated preterites which are well-attested in Gothic and some of these clearly survived into West Ger