Home Linguistics & Semiotics Chapter 4. PIE inheritance and word-formational innovation in Slavic motion verbs in -i-
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Chapter 4. PIE inheritance and word-formational innovation in Slavic motion verbs in -i-

  • Marc L. Greenberg
View more publications by John Benjamins Publishing Company
New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion
This chapter is in the book New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion

Abstract

The unprefixed imperfective verbs of motion with present tense in -i (such as Russian vodit’, vozit’, bezat’), most of which are considered indeterminate in the modern languages, developed over a lengthy period from Proto-Indo-European to the disintegration of Proto-Slavic. The final period of their development in Slavic shows striking innovation in the formal and semantic structures, including quasi-serialization in the compounding of verbal stems in such a way that the main lexical verb is modified by a manner component, e.g., *jaL ‘travel’ + -sd- ‘sit’ = jazd-i-ti ‘ride’. This innovative period in the development of motion verbs correlates with the period of migrations, which are seen as the end of the previous state of equilibrium in the Slavic speech community.

Abstract

The unprefixed imperfective verbs of motion with present tense in -i (such as Russian vodit’, vozit’, bezat’), most of which are considered indeterminate in the modern languages, developed over a lengthy period from Proto-Indo-European to the disintegration of Proto-Slavic. The final period of their development in Slavic shows striking innovation in the formal and semantic structures, including quasi-serialization in the compounding of verbal stems in such a way that the main lexical verb is modified by a manner component, e.g., *jaL ‘travel’ + -sd- ‘sit’ = jazd-i-ti ‘ride’. This innovative period in the development of motion verbs correlates with the period of migrations, which are seen as the end of the previous state of equilibrium in the Slavic speech community.

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