Full Description
Text in English & German. The present volume contains selected papers from a symposium on Internal Reconstruction in Indo- European: Methods, Results and Problems, which formed a subsection of the 16th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held at the University of Copenhagen. This is one of the first international conferences ever to deal with internal reconstruction. Internal reconstruction is what the historical linguist resorts to when the possibilities of more traditional comparative reconstruction have been exhausted. This is certainly the case at the level of the protolanguage: when Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed on the basis of a painstaking comparative analysis of the entire data field drawing on the full range of extant lE languages, there are quite often questions still left unanswered. Comparable methods can be applied to later stages of the language where the immediate prehistory is not accessible or a corroboration is wanted. Today, internal reconstruction is routinely applied at all levels of historical linguistic analysis as one of the tools that open up the linguistic prehistory. The papers published illustrate the full range of the phenomenon of internal reconstruction.
Contents
The Old Indic cvi construction, the Caland system, & the PIE adjective; Residues as an aid in Internal Reconstruction; On the expression of spatio-temporal locations in Late Proto-Indo-European; Reconsidering the system: verbal categorisation and the coding of valency in Tocharian; On the etymology of Latin optumus / optimus and the reflex of PIE *H2O; Genitive and adjective -- primary parts of the Proto-Indo-European language system?; Tmesis and anastrophe: the beginnings of configuration in Indo-European languages; Zur Rekonstruktion des urindogermanischen Konjunktivs zu athematischen Verbalstdmmen (vorldufige Mitteilung); Internal reconstruction vs. external comparison: the case of the Indo-Uralic laryngeals; *-bhi, *-bhis, *-ois: following the trail of the PIE instrumental plural; The Indo-European aspect-tense system and quantitative ablaut; The range of Tocharian a-umlaut; On the historical morphology of the Old Irish verb teit "goes"; How many noun suffixes did Proto-Indo-European have?; The Indo-European long-vowel preterite: new Latin evidence; Die semantische Rekonstruktion von Wortbildungssystemen (am Beispiel von Verbalabstrakta im Germanischen); Proto-Indo-European ablaut and root inflection: an internal reconstruction and inner-PIE morphological analysis; Internal reconstruction applied to Indo-European: where do we stand?
