Читать книгу Multiple Preverbs in Ancient Indo-European Languages - Chiara Zanchi - Страница 37

The terminological peculiarity relating to the category of ADVs-ADPs-PREVs is discussed by Garde with an eye to its typological implications (Garde 2004: 103ff.). Both ad-positions and pre-verbs are named after their positional properties.1 However, in the languages that feature both pre-verbs and pre-positions, this terminological consistency conceals a typological oddity.

Specifically, the category of “prepositions-preverbs” represents a two-fold paradox for word order typology. In the first place, the predominant phrase structure is reconstructed as centripetal (i.e. right-headed) for Indo-European (Garde 2004: 109).2 However, prepositions defy this generalization: prepositions function as heads of the phrases to which they belong, but are nevertheless placed on their left; by contrast, exclusively centripetal languages such as Turkish usually allow for postpositions only (cf. Garde 2004: 111). In the second place, in the majority of centrifugal (i.e. left-headed) languages, prepositions and preverbs are both allowed. However, in centrifugal languages, preverbal morphology usually plays a far greater role than in Indo-European; for example, prefixation is usually employed for derivational purposes, e.g. in Indonesian, in which the prefix pe- derives deverbal nouns (cf. Teselkin & Aleva 1960: 18, 57–58; Garde 2004: 111).

Furthermore, Garde (2004: 111) points out a paradox within the paradox: specifically, “the preposition and the preverb, though both preposed, exhibit divergent roles in the dependency relation, and accordingly in the order (i.e. centripetal or centrifugal) featured by the constituents in which they occur” (Garde 2004: 111, translation mine).3 The preposition functions as a head of the PP (i.e. centrifugal order), whereas the preverb works as a verbal modifier in the composite verb (i.e. centripetal order).

I suggest that such an apparent typological paradox can be resolved by keeping in mind the adverbial origin that prepositions and preverbs share (cf. Friedrich 1976; Section 3.1.3). In combination with both nouns and verbs, preverbs-adpositions started out as adverbial modifiers, occurring in front of the modified noun or verb. In this light, the word order featured by prepositions and preverbs is consistently centripetal (i.e. right-headed): the modifier precedes the modified.4 Later on, these modifier-modified combinations underwent conventionalization, and accordingly the mutual relationships holding between these elements were arguably tightened until the eventual creation of a new continuous constituent or a bound composite.