Complex predicates, simple inflecting verbs, and “uninflecting verbs” in Pre-Basque

Gontzal Aldai

doi:10.1515/ling-2020-0230

Article

Complex predicates, simple inflecting verbs, and “uninflecting verbs” in Pre-Basque

Gontzal Aldai

Published/Copyright: November 4, 2020

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From the journal Linguistics Volume 58 Issue 6

Abstract

How might Basque have looked before it came in contact with Latin? This interesting line of research may give us an idea of what the pre-Indo-European languages of Europe might have looked like, and it may help clarify how much contact-induced change Basque might have undergone during the last two millennia or so. The present paper puts forward the hypothesis that, towards the end of the Era (BC), Pre-Basque used to have a small class of verbs. These verbs were inflected for person and tense-aspect (although we know little about the specific characteristics of this inflectional system). Together with this small class of verbs, Pre-Basque had a larger group of uninflecting elements that combined with the inflecting verbs to form complex predicates. The group of uninflecting elements included bare nouns, adjectives, possibly adverbs, ideophones, and what I will call “uninflecting verbs”. The exact nature of these “uninflecting verbs” is hard to determine at this point, but they may have constituted a distinct part of speech. Certainly, this type of verbal organization is reminiscent of one common in Northern Australia. Thus, this paper also compares the reconstruction proposed for Pre-Basque with the verbal system typical in Northern Australian languages, to conclude that the similarities are remarkable and, therefore, that the verbal organization of Pre-Basque was quite different from that of the modern Western European languages, including Modern Basque.

Keywords: complex predicates; inflecting verbs (IV); uninflecting “verbs” (UV); Pre-Basque; Northern Australian languages; parts of speech (lexical categories, word classes); integration of verb loans

Corresponding author: Gontzal Aldai, Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country, Paseo de la Universidad 5, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, E-mail: gontzal.aldai@gmail.com

Funding source: Eusko Jaurlaritza

Acknowledgements

The present work profited from a visiting-scholar fellowship for research abroad, granted by the Basque Government, Department of Education, and completed at the UCSB Linguistics Department in 2016. I would like to thank the editors of Linguistics, Bernard Comrie, Marianne Mithun, Karen Tsai, the UCSB Linguistics community, and two anonymous reviewers for their help with earlier versions of this paper.

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Published Online: 2020-11-04

Published in Print: 2020-11-25

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0230

Keywords for this article

complex predicates; inflecting verbs (IV); uninflecting “verbs” (UV); Pre-Basque; Northern Australian languages; parts of speech (lexical categories, word classes); integration of verb loans