Luvian is the language of Anatolian hieroglyphic inscriptions and a close relative of Hittite. This book reconstructs the ethnic history of the Luvians through sociolinguistic methods with an emphasis on the interpretation of linguistic contacts.

The Iguvine Tables (Tabulae Iguvinae) are among the most invaluable documents of Italic linguistics and religion. Seven bronze tablets discovered in 1444 in the Umbrian town of Gubbio (ancient Iguvium), they record the rites and sacral laws of a priestly brotherhood, the Fratres Atiedii, with a degree of detail unparalleled elsewhere in ancient Italy. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines philological and linguistic, as well as ritual analysis, Michael Weiss not only addresses the many interpretive cruces that have puzzled scholars for a century and a half, but also...

This book takes a fresh look at the relationship between aspect, tense and mood in Early Vedic, the language of the Rigveda. Although numerous studies have examined the functional range of individual verbal categories in this language, this work is the first attempt to approach this problem from an overall, systemic perspective. With insights from formal semantics and linguistic typology, the author demonstrates that aspect represents a grammatically relevant semantic dimension on a par with tense in the Early Vedic verbal system, thereby indicating that the language has preserved an...

The Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian, Old Prussian) are well known for their archaic structure, but their contribution to Indo-European linguistics has hitherto often been underestimated. The aim of this book is to give a thorough survey of some of the major issues of Baltic linguistics. It consists of five chapters, devoted, respectively, to the problems of Baltic dialectology, to the development of the Baltic accentual system, to the fate of the neuter gender in Baltic, to the reconstruction of the Baltic verbal system and, finally, to the syntax of clitic forms in Baltic.

This book presents a synchronic and diachronic study of all verbal classes and categories of the Tocharian branch of Indo-European. It lists all attested Tocharian verbal forms, together with semantic and etymological information. The material has been subject to careful philological evaluation and incorporates unedited or unpublished texts of the Berlin, London, and Paris collections. In addition, this study consistently takes into account the linguistic variation within the Tocharian B language and the relative chronology of texts. Moreover, Tocharian offers crucial evidence for the...

In Classical Greek Syntax: Wackernagel's Law in Herodotus, David Goldstein offers the first theoretically-informed study of second-position clitics in Ancient Greek and challenges the long-standing belief that Greek word order is ‟free" or beyond the reach of systematic analysis. On the basis of Herodotus' Histories, he demonstrates that there are in fact systematic correspondences between clause structure and meaning. Crucial to this new model of the Greek clause is Wackernagel's Law, the generalization that enclitics and postpositives occur in ‟second position," as these...

Past research on the Sabellian languages has been devoted mainly to the phonetic and morphological features of these languages as elements for the reconstruction of the prehistoric stages of Latin. The present book aims at analysing the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic features of a subset of grammatical terms, the demonstratives. It contains a thorough description of their synchronic behaviour, which permits both a comparison to the Latin data with new hypotheses on the epigraphic genres in Republican Italy and a reconstruction of the Italic origins of these terms based on typological...

Infinitive im R̥gveda is an in-depth study of infinitives in Early Vedic, the language of the R̥gveda. Infinitives in Vedic have been studied from various perspectives. This book, however, is the first to give a detailed account of the full range of the attested morphological, syntactic, and semantic types. Based on insights from formal semantics and syntactic theory, the author gives explicit analyses for each type, paying special attention to the grammatical functions involved and to the control relations which govern the reference of subjects in infinitive phrases. On a more...

As one of the most central categories of the Tocharian verb, the subjunctive is of utmost importance for the reconstruction of the verbal system, the most rewarding domain of Tocharian historical grammar. Michael Peyrot provides a thorough analysis of the formation of the subjunctive in both Tocharian languages, and establishes its meaning on the basis of a systematic investigation of a wealth of published and unpublished texts. A careful reconstruction of the Proto-Tocharian stage provides a solid base for the comparison with Indo-European and the derivation of the Tocharian subjunctive from...

In The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Celtic, Nicholas Zair for the first time collects and assesses all the words from the Celtic languages which contained a laryngeal, and identifies the regular results of the laryngeals in each phonetic environment. This allows him to formulate previously unrecognised sound changes affecting Proto-Celtic, and assess the competing explanations for other developments. This work has far-reaching consequences for the understanding of the historical phonology and morphology of the Celtic languages, and for etymological work involving...