Verb inflection in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and auxiliation patterns in French and Italian

Abstract

This paper deals with the complex interaction between form and function in the verb morphosyntax of four Indo-European languages (French, Italian, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Beyond the difference in form, auxiliation patterns in French and Italian, and verb inflections in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit correlate, thanks to the agreement for number and person, to the expression of the relationship with the Subject. The different auxiliation patterns (sum and habeo) and the different inflections (middle and active) correlate to different properties of the Subject. In particular, these forms depend on the syntactic opposition between middle and non-middle. The ways of this dependency are regulated and systematic, although they appear fuzzy and chaotic, not only if the four languages are compared to each other, but also if different morphosyntactic combinations, inside the same language, are concerned.

Aorist voice patterns in the diachrony of Greek

“…Both structures are characterised by the movement of an argument from underlying object status to subject status. The difference between the two clauses concerns the underlying subject of the clause; there is a subject present in the deep structure in the passive (whether expressed or absent in the surface structure), but one does not occur in the unaccusative (cf., among others, La Fauci & Tronci 2009). For instance, the anticausative events which occurred after the death of Jesus are shaped into a sequence of unaccusative passive aorists in the Gospel of .…”