40 Jahre Partikelforschung/40 Years of Particle Research

 Bern, 11.-13. Februar 2009

Abstract

Annette Teffeteller (Montreal)
The diachronic syntax of Wackernagel’s Law clitics in Greek and Hittite

The significance for Indo-European linguistics of the phenomena designated by ‘Wackernagel’s Law’ was succinctly indicated by Calvert Watkins when he observed that ‘one of the few generally accepted syntactic statements about IE is Wackernagel’s Law, that enclitics originally occupied the second position in the sentence’ (Watkins 1964:1036). As Watkins further notes, Wackernagel’s findings were confirmed for Greek by Dover 1960, who emphasizes the diachronic changes in distribution of WL clitics in Greek: ‘Generally speaking, the earlier the Greek, the more closely does M + M + q > Mq M [‘mobile’ word + ‘mobile’ word + postpositive > ‘mobile’ word+postpositive + ‘mobile’ word] approximate to a rule.  … The progressive tendency in post-Homeric Greek to distribute [postpositives] within the clause, instead of concentrating them after the leading [‘mobile’ word], is a secondary phenomenon.’ (15,17) Already Dover saw that WL clitics are not necessarily placed after the first word or first constituent of ‘what would traditionally be defined as a “clause”’, but rather in second position ‘within one of the word-groups which constitute the clause’, a ‘word-group’ being indicated ‘by the pauses of the voice which precede and follow it’ (Dover 17, with reference to Fraenkel 1933), an insight confirmed by Devine and Stephens 1994: ‘In Greek…certain structures can remain outside the domain over which second position is computed and consequently may be interpreted as separate major phrases…’ (422). (The ‘prosodic flip’, proposed by Halpern 1992 in an effort to accommodate certain second-position clitics within the framework of generative grammar, followed by Hale 2007, is rejected by Devine and Stephens 2000.) Indeed, recognition of the import of WL phenomena, as stated by Ivanov 1999, ‘renders artificial a binary scheme that divides the sentence into two phrases only, i.e. a nominal one and a verbal one; the enclitic group often refers to the sentence as a whole, reproducing its main verb-actant structure, or even has a scope broader than a single sentence’. These functions of the WL clitics are most prominent in Hittite, with its six-place clitic ‘chain’ including various particles and pronominal elements (Carruba 1969, Hoffner 1973). This paper is concerned with the (diachronic) syntax of Wackernagel’s Law and with the implications of WL phenomena for theories of Indo-European syntax.

References:
  • Carruba, O. 1969. Die satzeinleitenden Partikeln in den indogermanischen Sprachen Anatoliens. Roma: Edizioni dell’Ateneo.
  • Devine, A.M. and L.D. Stephens. 1994. The Prosody of Greek Speech. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Devine, A.M. and L.D. Stephens. 2000. Discontinuous Syntax: Hyperbaton in Greek. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Dover, K.J. 1960. Greek Word Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Fraenkel, E. 1933. Kolon und Satz II. NGG 319-354.
  • Hale, M. 2007. Historical Linguistics: Theory and Method. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Halpern, A. 1992. Topics in the Syntax and Placement of Clitics. PhD thesis, Stanford University.
  • Hoffner, H.A. 1973. Studies of the Hittite particles, I. JAOS 93:520-526.
  • Ivanov, V.V. 1999. Indo-European syntactic rules and Gothic morphology. UCLA Indo-European Studies, ed. V.V. Ivanov and B. Vine. Los Angeles: UCLA.
  • Watkins, C. 1964. Preliminaries to the reconstruction of Indo-European sentence structure. In H. Lunt, ed., Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Linguists. The Hague: Mouton, 1035-1045.

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