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  • Modal Construction with man in Hititte and Akkadian
    Zorman, Marina
    Hittite has a simple verbal system with only two inflectional moods, indicative and imperative. Unreal and potential kinds of modal meaning are conveyed by means of the modal particle (-)man combined ... with the indicative form of the verb. Indo- Europeanists have long debated whether the small number of moods in Hittite should be regarded as an archaic feature of the Hittite verbal system or as a consequence of an early branching off of Hittite from the Indo-European parent stock. Recent research on the history of the Indo-European mood has established that Hittite actually lost the inherited subjunctive and athematic optative, while the Indo-European thematic optative is a relatively late construction which was not created until Hittite and the whole northern group of Indo-European languages had split off from the rest of the Indo-European family. The origin of the Hittite modal construction with (-)man plus indicative seems inexplicable using only internal Anatolian and Indo-European material. Akkadian had a homophone irrealis particle -man (with an Old Assyrian variant form -min), which was used in the same way as the Hittite (-)man: for a modal (unreal and potential) modification of declarative sentences and in conditionals. If we compare the structure of the Hittite and the Akkadian sentences with (-)man, we can see that the main difference between them is in word order: in apodosis the Akkadian -man could be attached to any stressed word, while the Hittite (-)man is always clause initial or attached to the first stressed word. Since the almost complete formal and semantic similarity cannot be accidental and the mere lexical borrowing of (-)man which was discussed in some earlier treatises on this question cannot explain the origin of the grammatical pattern as a whole, I propose to view the Hittite (-)man plus indicative as a product of linguistic change in a Hittite-Akkadian contact setting.
    Vir: The Journal of Indo-European studies. - ISSN 0092-2323 (Vol. 44, no. 3/4, 2016, str. 380-390)
    Vrsta gradiva - članek, sestavni del ; neleposlovje za odrasle
    Leto - 2016
    Jezik - angleški
    COBISS.SI-ID - 66291554

vir: The Journal of Indo-European studies. - ISSN 0092-2323 (Vol. 44, no. 3/4, 2016, str. 380-390)

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