Lexeme-based separationist morphology: evidence from the history of Greek deverbal abstracts

Abstract

The primary purpose of this article is to examine the formation of deverbal abstract nouns in the history of Greek, in particular those subclasses that involve an element -s- in their derivation (as, for example, ancient Greek ták-s-is ‘order/ arrangement’, a-tak-s-ía: ‘disorder’, both from the root tag- ‘order/arrange’). The historical development of such forms clearly reveals a process of remorphologisation whereby -s-, once the initial segment of a number of distinct derivational suffixes attached to ‘bare’ verb stems, eventually came to be reanalysed as a single, independent entity simply characterising the stem required for forming new deverbal abstracts. Furthermore, once the etymologically distinct -s- elements used in the formation of the aorist (perfective) and future stems of many verbs (including all ‘regular’ verbs, for example ancient Greek é-lu:-s-a ‘I set free (past perfective)’, lú:-s-o: ‘I shall set free’, both from root lu:- ‘set free’) were similarly confused (probably beginning in classical Greek of the 5th and 4th centuries BC), the resulting ‘s-stem’ of the verb, itself now a meaningless root variant, came increasingly to be regarded as itself providing this base for the formation of further deverbal nouns. Consequently, only verbs with an s-stem form novel deverbals in post-classical, medieval and modern Greek.

We are very grateful to the audience at the Mediterranean Morphology Meeting held in Malta in September 1999, where a version of this article was first presented and a number of important issues that we had overlooked were first raised. We should also like to thank the two anonymous referees, who challenged some central assumptions and arguments in ways that forced us to rethink our position very carefully and to defend our conclusions in novel ways. Their contribution has helped to make this a much better article than it was in its original form, though responsibility for any remaining deficiences naturally rests with the authors alone.