Ricerc@Sapienza

In the domain of Indo-European linguistics, Tocharian is now playing a more important role, which has been favoured by the increasing availability of the texts. The present article examines the concept of “creativity” in historical linguistics, by analysing palaeographic and linguistic matters related to hapax legomena, emendations, and conjectural readings in Tocharian manuscripts.

The article investigates the evolution of the PIE diphthong *-o in Tocharian in wordfinal position. Contrary to some previous accounts, it is argued here that *-o did not monophthongise to a palatalising front vowel in Proto-Tocharian. Rather, it remained a diphthong that then evolved into Tocharian A -e by regular sound law, while in Tocharian B it turned into -i by conditioned sound change.

L'articolo, in lingua inglese, illustra alcuni tratti salienti del raddoppiamento nelle lingue indoeuropee antiche: funzione morfologica e lessicale, concorrenza con altre marche morfologiche e conseguente declino, considerato attraverso l'esempio fornito dalle lingue germaniche antiche.

The aim of the present article is to trace the origin and the evolution of the Tocharian A ending -äṃ, which is the plural marker of a closed class of nouns, whose Tocharian B counterparts are ranged under other inflectional classes.

The present discussion, which is articulated within the theoretical framework of cognitive semantics, aims to reconsider the homonymy between the Indo-European roots *men- ‘to think, to have in mind’ and *men- ‘to delay, linger, remain’.

Guest-editor of a Special issue focused on the morphological isoglosses in the Indo-European languages.

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.