Cover not available

Article published In: Studies in Language
Vol. 44:4 (2020) ► pp.788–811

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

From verb to New Event Marker

A new look at the Hittite pai- and uwa- constructions

ORCiD logo with link | University of Pavia | National Research University Higher School of Economics
Published online: 25 August 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.20004.lur
Abstract
In Hittite, deictic motion verbs pai- ‘go’ and uwa- ‘come’ may co-occur in a monoclausal structure with a second verb that carries the lexical meaning. As yet, their exact function remains obscure. I argue that motion verbs involved in such construction underwent transcategorization and function as New Event Markers. I show that this development is best explained as an instance of constructionalization involving both the motion verbs and the second verb in the clause, which is based on a pragmatic inference arising when motion verbs were used without a spatial complement. Either motion verb contributes a different semantics to the construction based on the different perspective regarding the deictic center identified by the ego, whereby pai- ‘go’ (motion originating from the deictic center) marks an event as close in time and controlled, while uwa- ‘come’ (motion originating outside the deictic center) indicates distance in time and possible lack of control.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The pai- and uwa- plus agreeing verb construction
    • 2.1Grammaticalization and constructionalization
    • 2.2Function of the pai-/uwa-AV construction
    • 2.3Constructions of Hittite motion verbs and constructionalization
    • 2.4Differences between the pai-AV and the uwa-AV construction
  • 3.Diachrony
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (45)
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2006. Serial verb constructions in typological perspective. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (eds.), Serial verb constructions, 1–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2018. Serial verbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barðdal, Jóhanna, Elena Smirnova, Lotte Sommerer & Spike Gildea (eds.). 2015. Diachronic construction grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beckman, Gary M. 1996. Hittite diplomatic texts. Atlanta (GA): Scholars Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bergs, Alexander & Gabriele Diewald (eds.). 2008. Constructions and language change. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(eds.). 2009. Contexts and constructions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dunkel, George. 1985. IE horatory *ey, *eyte, Ved. ēta … stavama, Hitt. ehu+wa it, Horn. εἰ δ’ἀγε. Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 461. 47–79.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ebert, Karen H. 1987. Discourse function of motion verbs in Chadic. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 101. 53–71.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evans, Vyvyan. 2003. The structure of time. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles. 1966. Deictic categories in the semantics of ‘come’. Foundations of Language 21. 219–227.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1983. How to know whether you are coming or going. In Gisa Rauh (ed.), Essays on deixis, 219–221. Tubingen: Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Friedrich, Johannes. 1930. Staatsverträge des Ḫatti-Reiches in hethitischer Sprache. 21. Teil. Leipzig: Hinrich.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1960. Hethitisches Elementarbuch. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garrett, Andrew. 1990. The syntax of Anatolian pronominal clitics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University PhD dissertation.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goetze, Albrecht. 1933. Die Annalen des Mursilis. Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-Aegyptischen Gesellschaft, 38 Band, Heft VI 23.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 2010. The behaviour-before-coding principle in syntactic change. In Franck Floricic (ed.), Essais de typologie et de linguistique générale: Mélanges offerts à Denis Creissels, 541–554. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de l’École Normale Superieure.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. The serial verb construction: Comparative concept and cross-linguistic generalizations. Language and Linguistics 17(3). 291–319.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd. 2000. On the rise of new-event markers in Kxoe. In Rainer Vossen, Angelika Mietzner & Antje Meifiner (eds.) Mehr als nur Worte …: Afrikanistische Beitrage zum 65. Geburtstag von Franz Rottland, 269–284. Köln: Köppe.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2013. Corpus-based approaches to constructional change. In Thomas Hoffmann & Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar, 458–477. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hoffner, Harry A. & H. Craig Melchert. 2008. A grammar of the Hittite language. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kloekhorst, Alwin. 2008. Etymological dictionary of the Hittite inherited lexicon. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Koller, Bernhard. 2015. Hittite pai- ‘go’ and uwa- ‘come’ as restructuring verbs. In Leonid Kulikov & Nikolaos Lavidas (eds.), Proto-Indo-European syntax and its development, 79–99. Amstedam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
König, Christa, Bernd Heine & Karsten Legère. 2015. The Akie language of Tanzania: A sketch of discourse grammar. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuteva, Tanya, Bernd Heine, Bo Hong, Haiping Long, Heiko Narrog & Seongha Rhee. 2019. World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Luraghi, Silvia. 1990. Old Hittite sentence structure. London-New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1993. Verb serialization and word order. Evidence from Hittite. In: Henning Aertsen & Robert J. Jeffers (eds.), Historical linguistics 1989, 267–281. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. Processi di grammaticalizzazione in ittita. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 81(1). 45–47.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. I verbi ausiliari in ittita. In: Giuliano Bernini, Pierluigi Cuzzolin & Piera Molinelli (eds.), Ars Linguistica. Studi in onore di Paolo Ramat, 299–322. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Experiencer predicates in Hittite. In Ronald. I. Kim, Elisabeth Rieken, Norbert Oettinger & Michael J. Weiss (eds.), Ex Anatolia lux, 249–264. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. The syntax of Anatolian. In J. Klein. Brian Joseph & Matthias Fritz (eds.), Handbook of comparative and historical Indo-European linguistics, 274–291. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Luraghi, Silvia & Guglielmo Inglese. 2018. Subordination and sentence connectives in Old Hittite: A quantitative analysis. In: Elisabeth Rieken, Teresa Roth & Ulrich Geupel (eds.), 100 Jahre Entzifferung des Hethitischen. Morphosyntaktische Kategorien in Sprachgeschichte und Forschung, 259–274. Wiesbaden: Reichert.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Neu, Erich. 1995. Futur im Hethitischen? In Heinrich Hettrich, Wolfgang Hock, Peter-Arnold Mumm & Norbert Oettinger (eds.), Verba et Structurae: Festschrift für Klaus Strunk zum 65. Geburtstag, 195–202. Innsbruck: Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft der Universitat Innsbruck.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rieken, Elisabeth. 2010. Die periphrastischen Konstruktionen mit pai- ‘gehen’ und uwa- ‘kommen’ im Hethitischen. In Christel Ruster, Jean Catsanicos & René Lebrun (eds.), la-a-ma-an-te-et na-ak-ki-i: Studia anatolica in memoriam Erich Neu scripta, 217–239. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sideltsev, Andrei. 2017. Accented clitics in Hittite? Transactions of the Philological Society 115(2). 176–211. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and constructional changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2014. Toward a constructional framework for research on language change. Cognitive Linguistic Studies 1(1). 3–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van den Hout, Theo. 2003. Studies in the Hittite phraseological construction. I. Its syntactic and semantic properties. In Gary Beckman, Richard H. Beal & Gregory McMahon (eds.), Hittite studies in honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr. on the occasion of his 65th birthday, 177–204. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Studies in the Hittite phraseological construction, II: Its origin. Hethithica 161. 191–204.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Widmer, Paul. 2009. Hethitisch nu als Mittel der informationsstrukturellen und syntaktischen Verknüpfung. In Elisabeth Rieken & Paul Widmer (eds.) Pragmatische Kategorien. Form, Funktion und Diachronie. Arbeitstagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, 321–333. Wiesbaden: Reichert.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wilhelm, Gernoth & Francesco Fuscagni (eds.). 2020. Hethitologie Portal Mainz. Available at: [URL] (last access 22 July 2020).
Yates, Anthony D. 2014. On the PIE ‘quasi-serial verb’ construction: Origin and development. In: Stephanie W. Jamison, H. Craig Melchert & Brent Vine (eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, 237–55. Bremen: Hempen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Younger, K. Lawson. 1990. Ancient conquest accounts. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue