Ricerc@Sapienza

In PIE, quality modifiers were expressed by stative verbs and nominal epithets, rather than by special adjectival lexemes. Adjectives did not form a separate lexical class. This made the encoding of the NP constituency less explicit. If we consider what I suggest calling “second-generation IE languages” we can observe a general tendency to create new, more explicit morphological means of dependency marking within a NP. The exact outcomes of this diachronic process vary from one language to another. However, if we parametrise the variation, a common pattern becomes clearly observable.