Diachronic Studies in Indo-European Degree Morphology

Abstract

This work comprises three thematically linked studies in typologically informed IndoEuropean historical linguistics, each dealing with different aspects of the development of degree morphology within the family. The first study shows that multiple morphological and syntactic strategies for the expression of degree should be reconstructed for Proto-IndoEuropean, with semantic and morphological factors governing the choice of strategy for a given word. Furthermore, the origin of the “secondary comparative” of Indo-Iranian and Greek is traced to an archaic locatival morpheme *-er. The second study uses Greek and Latin evidence to investigate the origin of the Latvian comparative marker -āk- and its close cognates within Balto-Slavic. This leads to the reconstruction for Proto-Nuclear Indo-European of an athematic compound suffix *-eh₂- k- (deriving evaluative-characterizing substantives from nominal bases) and of its thematic counterpart *-eh₂- ko- (deriving corresponding adjectives). The third study explains why several branches of Indo-European show variation between degree forms with or without a seemingly unetymological long vowel. It is argued that in each case, adjectival degree forms were influenced by their adverbial counterparts, with the same process operating on different morphological material in different branches. Parallels from other language families (Uralic, Tungusic, Turkic) bolster various aspects of these proposals.

As Indo-European is the only language family combining a wide variety of synthetic degree forms with a long history of attestation, it is uniquely capable of providing insight into processes of development, decay, and renewal in this morphosyntactic subcategory. This dissertation is thus a contribution both to the historical morphology of Indo-European in particular and to the typology of degree morphology in general.