Proto-Indo-European Lexical Aspect and Stem Patterns
Proto-Indo-European lexical aspect and stem patterns Petr Kocharov* 1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE PIE STEM PATTERNS According to the traditional reconstruction, largely based on the Ancient Greek and Old Indic verbal systems, the finite forms of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) verb were derived from three types of tense-aspect stems conventionally labeled “present”, “aorist”, and “perfect” since they could take the Present, Aorist, and Perfect Indicative respectively. These three types of stems are usually defined as expressing the grammatical category of aspect while endings together with the preterite prefix – augment expressed the tense, person, number, and voice categories, see Clackson 2007: 114-56 with a concise overview of the PIE verbal morphology including some issues related to the discrepancies between the Greco-Aryan and Anatolian verbal systems. Each stem type could be additionally specified by the ablaut, reduplication, and a range of affixes. The range of stem kinds per type increases in the following order: perfect (root perfect, reduplicative perfect) < aorist (root aorist, sigmatic aorist, reduplicative aorist, thematic aorist) < present (root present, reduplicated present, infix present, thematic present, *sḱe/o-present, *ye/o- presents, etc.). This distribution allows to predict that a substantial number of combinations — stem patterns — existed already in the proto-language. Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben (LIV), which is nowadays the most comprehensive reference book on the PIE verb, provides reconstructions of around 1200 roots with a variety of stem patterns constituted by 20 present stems, 3 aorist stems, and one perfect stem, not taking into account causatives-iteratives, desideratives, intensives, fientives, and essives. A comparable paradigmatic diversity is still observable in Greek and Vedic, the two IE branches that inherited the three-way * Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences ; St.
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