Appendix I. Proto-Indo-European Syntax

A Sentence is a form of words which contains a State­ment, a Question, an Exclamation, or a Command.

a.  A sentence in the form of a Statement is called a Declarative Sentence:  as, the dog runs.

b.  A sentence in the form of a Question is called an Interroga­tive Sentence: as, does the dog run?

c.   A sentence in the form of an Exclamation is called an Exclamatory Sentence: as, how fast the dog runs !

d.  A sentence in the form of a Command, an Exhortation, or an Entreaty is called an Imperative Sentence : as, go, run across the Alps; or let the dog run.

NOTE. After Lehman (1974), “The fundamental order of sentences in PIE appears to be OV. Support for this assumption is evident in the oldest texts of the materials attested earliest in the IE dialects. The fundamental order of sentences in these early dialects cannot be determined solely by frequency of sentence patterns. For, like other linguistic constructions, sentence patterns manifest marked as well as unmarked order. Marked order is expected in literary materials. The documents surviving from the earliest dialects are virtually all in verse or in literary forms of prose. Accordingly many of the individual sentences do not have the unmarked order, with verb final. For this reason conclusions about the characteristic word order of PIE and the early dialects will be based in part on those syntactic patterns that are rarely modified for literary and rhetorical effect: comparative constructions, the presence of postpositions and prepositions, and the absence of prefixes, (...)”.

Lehman is criticized by Friedrich (1975) who, like Watkins (1976) and Miller (1975), support a VO prehistoric situation, probably SVO (like those found in ‘central’ IE areas), with non-consistent dialectal SOV findings. In any case (viz. Lehman and Miller), an older IE I or IE II OV (VSO for Miller) would have been substituted by a newer VO (SOV for Miller, later SVO through a process of verb transposition) – thus, all Indo-European dialects attested have evolved (thus probably from a common Late PIE trend) into a modern SVO.

Modern Indo-European, as a modern IE language, may follow the stricter formal patterns attested in the oldest inscriptions, i.e. (S)OV, as in Vedic Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Old Latin and Avestan. A newer, general (S)VO order (found in Greek, Latin, Avestan, Germanic, etc.), which reveals the change from OV in Early PIE towards a VO in Late PIE for the spoken language of Europe – and even some forms of litterary uses, as e.g. journalism –  could be used in non-formal contexts.

 

PIE sentences were either Nominal, i.e. formed by nouns, or Verbal, if they included a verb.

I. A Subject and a Predicate. The Subject of a sentence is the person or thing spoken of.  The Predicate is that which is said of the Subject.

a. The Subject is usually a Noun or Pronoun, or some word or group of words used as a Noun.

b. The Predicate of a sentence may be a Verb (as the dog runs), or it may consist of some form of es and a Noun or Adjective which describes or defines the subject (as It is good). Such a noun or adjective is called a Predicate Noun or Adjective.

II.  In Proto-Indo-European, simple sentences may be composed of only one word, a noun or a verb; as, God!, or (it) rains.

NOTE 1. Nominal sentences of this type are usually Interjections and Vocatives. Verbal sentences of this type include Imperatives (at least of 2^nd P.Sg.) and impersonal verbs, which had never a subject in the oldest dialects attested; as, for Eng. (it) rains, cf. Goth. rigneiþ, Lat. pluit, Gk. ὓει, Skt. várṣati. It is believed that when IE dialects became SVO in structure, so that a subject was required, the third singular anaphoric pronoun, corresponding to it, German es, French il, etc., was introduced as subject in such sentences. Such pronouns were introduced because SVO languages must have subjects in sentences, as do intransitive verbs in any OV language. Such verbs could be supplemented by substantives in various cases, among them the accusative. These constructions are especially prominent for verbs referring to the emotions; as, Lat. miseret, pudet, taedet, Skr. kitaváṃ tatāpa. Compare also Cicero’s Lat. eōrum nōs miseret, or O.H.G. thes gánges thih nirthrúzzi. In PIE sentences various case forms could be used with verbs. The simplest sentences may consist of verbs accompanied by nouns in seven of the eight cases; only the vocative is not so used. The nouns fill the role of objects or, possibly better stated, of complements.

NOTE 2. Besides the simple sentence which consists only of a verb, a simple sentence in the early dialects and in PIE could consist of a verb accompanied by a noun or pronoun as complement. A subject however wasn’t mandatory. Nor were other constructions which may seem to be natural, such as indirect objects with verbs like ‘give’. The root *dō- or in its earlier form *deH- had in its simplest sense the meaning ‘present’ and was often unaccompanied by any nominal expression (Lehman).

Nominal sentences, in which a substantive is equated with another substantive, an adjective, or a particle, make up one of the simplest type of sentence in PIE.

NOTE 1. Such a type of sentence is found in almost every IE dialect; cf. Hitt. attaš aššuš, “the father (is) good”, Skr. tváṃ váruṇa, “you (are) Varuna”, O.Pers. adam Dārayavauš, “I (am) Darius”, Lat. omnia praeclara rara, “all the best things (are) rare”, etc. In all dialects, however, such sentences were restricted in its use to a especially formal use or, on the contrary, they are found more often than originally in PIE. Thus, in Latin and Germanic dialects they are found in proverbs and sayings, as in Old Irish; in Greek it is also found in epic and poetry. However, in Balto-Slavic dialects the pure nominal sentence has become the usual type of nominal sentence, even when the predicate is an adverb or an adverbial case. However, such a use, which is more extended in modern dialects (like Russian) than in the older ones (as Old Slavic), is considered the result of Finno-Ugrian influence.

NOTE 2. In the course of time a nominal sentence required a verb; this development is in accordance with the subjective characteristic of PIE and the endings which came to replace the individual qualifier markers of early PIE. The various dialects no longer had a distinct equational sentence type. Verbs might of course be omitted by ellipsis. And, remarkably, in Slavic, nominal sentences were reintroduced, as Meillet has demonstrated (1906-1908). The reintroduction is probably a result of influence from OV languages, such as the Finno-Ugric. This phenomenon illustrates that syntactic constructions and syntactic characteristics must be carefully studied before they can be ascribed to inheritance. In North Germanic too an OV characteristic was reintroduced, with the loss of prefixes towards the end of the first millennium A.D. (Lehmann 1970). Yet in spite of these subsequent OV influences, nominal sentences must be assumed for PIE.

A. There are traces of Pure Nominal Sentences with a predicate made by an oblique case of a noun or a prepositional compound, although they are not common to all Indo-European dialects.

NOTE. Apart from Balto-Slavic examples (due to Finno-Ugric influence), only some isolated examples are found; cf. Skr. havyaír Agnír mánuṣa īrayádhyai, “Agni must be prayed with the sacrifices of men”, Gk. pàr hépoige kaì hálloi oi ké mé timḗsousi, “near me (there are) others who [particle] will praise me” (Mendoza).

B. In addition to such expansions by means of additional nouns in nonrequired cases, sentences could be expanded by means of particles.

NOTE. For Lehman, three subsets of particles came to be particularly important. One of these is the set of preverbs, such as ā. Another is the set of sentence connectives, such as Hitt. nu. The third is the set of qualifier expressions, e.g., PIE mē ‘(must) not’. An additional subset, conjunctions introducing clauses, will be discussed below in the section on compound clauses.

Preverbs are distinctively characterized by being closely associated with verbs and modifying their meaning. In their normal position they stand directly before verbs (Watkins 1964).

Generally, thus, Concordance governed both members of the Pure Nominal Sentence.

NOTE. Unlike the personal verb and its complements (governed by inflection), the Nominal Sentence showed a strong reliance on Concordance between Subject and Predicate as a definitory feature: both needed the same case, and tended to have the same number and gender.

The copulative verb es is only necessary when introducing late categories in the verbal morphology, like Time and Mood. Therefore, when the Mood is the Indicative, and the Time is neuter (proverbs without timing, or Present with semantic neuter) there is no need to use es.

NOTE 1. The basic form of nominal sentences has, however, been a matter of dispute. Some Indo-Europeanists propose that the absence of a verb in nominal sentences is a result of ellipsis and assume an underlying verb es- ‘be’ (Benveniste 1950). They support this assumption by pointing to the requirement of such a verb if the nominal sentence is in the past tense; cf. Hitt. ABU.I̯A genzuu̯alaš ešta, “My father was merciful”. On the contrary, Meillet (1906-1908), followed by Lehman and Mendoza, thought that nominal sentences did not require a verb but that a verb might be included for emphasis. This conclusion may be supported by noting that the qualifiers which were found in PIE could be used in nominal sentences without a verb. As an example we may cite a Hittite sentence which is negative and imperative, 1-aš 1-edani menahhanda lē idāluš, “One should not be evil toward another one”. Yet, if a passage was to be explicit, a form of es could be used, as in Skr. nákir indra tvád úttaro ná jyyāṅ asti, “No one is higher than you, Indra, nor greater”.

NOTE 2. On the original meaning of es, since Brugmann (1925) meant originally “exist” hence its use as a copulative verb through constructions in which the predicate express the existence of the subject, as in Hom. Gk. eím Oduseús Laertiádes, “I am Odisseus, son of Laertes” (Mendoza). In PIE times there were seemingly other verbs (with similar meanings of ‘exist’) which could be used as copulatives; compare IE bhū, “exist, become, grow” (cf. O.Ind. bhávati, or as supletives in Lat. past fui, O.Ir. ba, O.Lith. búvo, fut. bùs, O.C.S. impf. bease, etc.), Germanic wes, ‘live, dwell’.

The most simple structure of the common Indo-European sentence consists of a verb, i.e. the carrying out of an action. In it, none of the verbal actors (Subject and Object) must be expressed – the subject is usually not obligatory, and the object appears only when it is linked to the lexical nature of the verb.

NOTE. The oldest morphological categories, even time, were expressed in the PIE through lexical means, and many remains are found of such a system; cf. Hitt. -za (reflexive), modal particles in Gk. and O.Ind., modal negation in some IE dialects, or the simple change in intonation, which made interrogative or imperative a declarative sentence – in fact, the imperative lacks a mark of its own.

The relationship between the Subject and the Object is expressed through the case.

There is no clear morphological distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs in Proto-Indo-European.

NOTE. Some Indo-European dialects have specialized some verbal suffixes as transitives (causatives) or intransitives, as Gk. -en, Gmc. -io, Lat. -a, etc., while in some others a preverb combined with a verbal root makes the basic verb transitive or intransitive.

When subjects are explicitly expressed, the nominative is the case employed.

NOTE. Expression of the subject is the most prominent extension of simple sentences to include more than one substantival expression. Besides such explicit mention of the subject, predicates may consist of verbs accompanied by two or more nouns, in cases which supplement the meanings of the verbs (v.i.). Such constructions must be distinguished from the inclusion of additional nouns whose case forms indicate adverbial use.

Few verbs are mandatorily accompanied by two nouns.

1. the use of the dative in addition to the accusative, as in Skr. tbhiām enaṃ pári dehi, ‘Give him over to those two’.

2. the instrumental and ablative, as Skr. áhan vṛtrám ... índro vájreṇa, ‘Indra killed ... Vṛtra with his bolt’. Skr. tváṃ dásyūm̐r ókaso agna ājaḥ, ‘You drove the enemies from the house, O Agni.’

NOTE.  While the addition to these sentences which is indicated by the nouns in the instrumental and the ablative is essential for the meaning of the lines in their context, it does not need to be included in the sentence for syntactic reasons.

3.  The causative accompanied by two accusatives, as Skr. devn̐ uśataḥ pāyayā havíḥ, ‘Make the desiring gods drink the libation’.

In such sentences the agent-accusative represents the object of the causative element: as Arthur A. Macdonell indicated (1916), in a corresponding simple sentence this noun would have been given in the nominative, as Skr. dev havíḥ pibanti, ‘The gods drink the libation’.

Accordingly a simple verb in PIE was at the most accompanied by one substantive, unless the additional substantive was complementary or adverbial.

Nonmandatory case forms are found in great variety, as may be determined from the studies of substantival inflections and their uses. Five groups of adverbial elements are identified: (1) circumstance, purpose, or result; (2) time; (3) place; (4) manner; (5) means.

1) Additional case forms may be used to indicate the Purpose, Result, or Circumstance of an action.

So e.g. the Instrumental in Skr. mṛḷáyā naḥ suastí, ‘Be gracious to us for our well-being’.

The Dative was commonly used in this sense, as in the infinitival form Skr. prá ṇa yur jīváse soma tārīḥ ‘Extend our years, soma, for our living [so that we may live long].’,

NOTE. Cf. Hitt. nu-kan ^mNana-Luin kuin DUMU.LUGAL ANA ^mNuwanza haluki para nehhun, ‘and the prince NanaLUiš whom I sent to Nuwanza to convey the message’ where Hittite dative noun haluki. (Raman 1973).

When an animate noun is involved, this use of the dative has been labeled the indirect object; as, Skr. riṇákti kṛṣṇ raṛuṣya pánthām, ‘Black night gives up the path to the red sun’.

NOTE. As these examples may indicate, the dative, like the other cases, must be interpreted with reference to the lexical properties of the verbal element.

2) A further adverbial segment in sentences indicates the Time of Occurrence. The cases in question are various, as in Skr. dívā náktaṃ śárum asmád yuyotam, ‘By day and during the night protect us from the arrow’.

NOTE. The nominal form dívā, which with change of accent is no longer an instrumental but an adverbial form outside the paradigm, and the accusative náktaṃ differ in meaning. The instrumental, like the locative, refers to a point in time, though the “point” may be extended; the accusative, to an extent of time. Differing cases accordingly provide different meanings for nouns marked for the lexical category time.

3) Nouns indicating Place also differ in meaning according to case form:

A. The Accusative indicates the goal of an action, as in Lat. Rōmam īre ‘go to Rome’, Hitt. tuš alkištan tarnahhe ‘and those (birds) I release to the branch’ (Otten and Souček 1969:38 § 37).

B. The Instrumental indicates the place “over which an action extends” (Macdonell 1916: 306): sárasvatyā yānti ‘they go along the Sarasvatī’.

C. The Ablative indicates the starting point of the action: sá ráthāt papāta ‘he fell from his chariot’; and the following example from Hittite (Otten and Souček 1969): iššaz (š)mit lālan AN.BARaš [d]āi, ‘He takes the iron tongue out of their mouths.’

D. The Locative indicates a point in space, e.g., Skt. diví ‘in heaven’ or the locative kardi in the following Hittite example (Otten and Souček): kardi-šmi-i̯a-at-kán dahhun, ‘And I took away that [illness which was] in your heart’.

Nouns with lexical features for place and for time may be used in the same sentence, as in Skr. ástam úpa náktam eti, ‘He goes during the night to the house’. Although both nouns are in the Accusative, the differing lexical features lead to different interpretations of the case. In this way, inflectional markers combine with lexical features to yield a wide variety of adverbial elements.

4) Among the adverbial elements which are most diverse in surface forms are those referring to Manner. Various cases are used, as follows.

A. The Accusative is especially frequent with adjectives, such as Skt. kṣiprám ‘quickly’, bahú ‘greatly’, nyák ‘downward’.

B. The Instrumental is also used, in the plural, as in Skt. máhobhiḥ ‘mightily’, as well as in the singular, sáhasā ‘suddenly’.

Similar to the expression of manner is the instrumental used to express the sense of accompaniment: Skr. devó devébhir ā́gamat, ‘May the god come [in such a way that he is] accompanied by the other gods’.

C. The Ablative is also used to express manner in connection with a restricted number of verbs such as those expressing ‘fear’: réjante víśvā kṛtrímāṇi bhīṣ, ‘All creatures tremble fearfully’.

5) Adverbial expressions of Means are expressed especially by the instrumental; as, Skr. áhan vṛtrám ... índro vájreṇa, ‘Indra killed ... Vṛtra with his bolt.’ The noun involved frequently refers to an instrument; cf. Hitt. kalulupuš šmuš gapinit hulaliemi, ‘I wind the thread around their fingers’.

Animate nouns may also be so used. When they are, they indicate the agent: agnínā turváṣaṃ yáduṃ parāváta ugr devaṃ havāmahe, ‘Through Agni we call from far Turvasa, Yadu, and Ugradeva’. This use led to the use of the instrumental as the agent in passive constructions.

The sentence was characterized in PIE by patterns of Order and by Selection.

A. Selection classes were determined in part by inflection, in part by lexical categories, most of which were covert.

NOTE. Some lexical categories were characterized at least in part by formal features, such as abstract nouns marked by -ti-, nouns in the religious sphere marked by -u- and collectives marked by *-h.

B. In addition to characterization by means of order and categories of selection, the sentence was also delimited by Intonation based on variations in pitch.

To the extent that the pitch phonemes of PIE have been determined, a high pitch may be posited, which could stand on one syllable per word, and a low pitch, which was not so restricted.

NOTE. The location of the high pitch is determined by Lehman primarily from the evidence in Vedic; the theory that this was inherited from PIE received important corroboration from Karl Verner's demonstration of its maintenance into Germanic (1875). Thus the often cited correlation between the position of the accent in the Vedic perfect and the differing consonants in Germanic provided decisive evidence for reconstruction of the PIE pitch accent as well as for Verner's law, as in the perfect (preterite) forms of the root deik-, show.

Words were characterized on one syllable by a high pitch accent, unless they were enclitic, that is, unmarked for accent.

Accented words could lose their high pitch accent if they were placed at specific positions in sentences.

A.  Vocatives lost their accent if they were medial in a sentence or clause; and finite verbs lost their accent unless they stood initially in an independent clause or in any position in a dependent clause in Vedic. These same rules may be assumed for PIE. On the basis of the two characteristic patterns of loss of accent for verbs, characteristic patterns of intonation may also be posited for the IE sentence.

Judging on the basis of loss of high pitch accent of verbs in them, independent clauses were characterized by final dropping in pitch. For in unmarked order the verb stands finally in the clause.

Clauses, however, which are marked either to convey emphasis or to indicate subordination, do not undergo such lowering. They may be distinguished with final

NOTE. The intonation pattern indicated by apparently conveyed the notion of an emotional or emphatic utterance or one requiring supplementation, as by another clause. These conclusions are supported by the patterns found in Germanic alliterative verse. For, as is well known, verbs were frequently placed by poets in the fourth, nonalliterating, metrically prominent position in the line: þeodcyninga þrym gefrūnon, of-people's-kings glory we-heard-of, ‘We heard of the glory of the kings of the people’. This placing of verbs, retained by metrical convention in Germanic verse, presumably maintains evidence for the IE intonation pattern. For, by contrast, verbs could alliterate when they stood initially in clauses or in subordinate clauses; egsode eorlas, syððan ǣrest wearð, he-terrified men since first he-was, ‘He terrified men from the time he first was [found]’. þenden wordum wēold wine Scyldinga, as-long-as with-words he-ruled the-friend of-the-Scyldings. The patterns of alliteration in the oldest Germanic verse accordingly support the conclusions that have been derived from Vedic accentuation regarding the intonation of the Indo-European sentence, as do patterns in other dialects.

Among such patterns is the preference for enclitics in second position in the sentence (Wackernagel 1892). Words found in this position are particles, pronouns, and verbs, which have no accent in Vedic texts. This observation of Wackernagel supports the conclusion that the intonation of the sentence was characterized by initial high pitch, with the voice trailing off at the end. For the enclitic elements were not placed initially, but rather they occupied positions in which unaccented portions of words were expected, as in Skr. prāvep mā bṛható mādayanti, ‘The dangling ones of the lofty tree gladden me’. The pronoun mā ‘me’, like other such enclitics, makes up a phrase with the initial word; in this way it is comparable to unaccented syllables of individual words, as in Skr. pravātej íriṇe várvṛtānāḥ, ‘[born] in a windy place, rolling on the dice-board’

A simple sentence then consisted not only of a unit accompanied by an intonation pattern, but also of subunits or phrases. These were identified by their accent and also by patterns of permitted finals.

The particles concerned are PIE nu, so, to, all of them introductory particles.

NOTE. Their homonymity with the adverb nu, nun and the anaphoric pronoun was one of the reasons earlier Indo-Europeanists failed to recognize them and their function. Yet Delbrück had already noted the clause-introducing function of Skr. sa (1888), as in Skr. tásya tni śīrṣṇi prá cicheda. sá yát somapnam sa tátaḥ kapíñjalaḥ sám abhavat, ‘He struck off his heads. From the one that drank soma, the hazel-hen was created’. Delbrück identified sa in this and other sentences as a particle and not a pronoun, for it did not agree in gender with a noun in the sentence. But it remained for Hittite to clarify the situation.

In Hittite texts the introductory use of the particles is unmistakable (J.Friedrich 1960); ta and šu occur primarily in the early texts, nu in the later, as illustrated in the following Old Hittite example (Otten and Souček 1969): GAD-an pešiemi šu- uš LÚ-aš natta aušzi ‘I throw a cloth over it and no one will see them’.

Besides such an introductory function (here as often elsewhere translated ‘and’), these particles were used as first element in a chain of enclitics, as in n-at-ši ‘and it to-him’, nu-mu-za-kan ‘and to-me self within’ and so on.

NOTE 1. In Homeric Greek such strings of particles follow different orders, but reflect the IE construction, as in: oudé nu soí per entrépetai phílon êtor, Olúmpie, ‘But your heart doesn't notice, Zeus’. As the translation of per here indicates, some particles were used to indicate the relationships between clauses marking the simple sentence.

NOTE 2. Many simple sentences in PIE would then be similar to those in Hittite and Vedic Sanskrit, such as those in the charming story taken by Delbrück from the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa. Among the simplest is Skr. tám índro didveṣa, ‘Indra hated him’. Presumably tam is a conflated form of the particle ta and the enclitic accusative singular pronoun; the combination is attested in Hittite as ta-an (J. Friedrich 1960). Besides the use of sentence-delimiting particles, these examples illustrate the simplicity of PIE sentences. Of the fifteen sentences in the story, only two have more than one nominal form per verb, and these are adverbial as observed above. Similar examples from the other early dialects could be cited, such as the Italic inscription of Praeneste, or the Germanic Gallehus inscription: Ek HlewagastiR HoltijaR horna tawido, ‘I, Hlewagastir of Holt, made the horn’. In these late texts, the subject was mandatory, and accordingly two nominal forms had come to be standard for the sentence. If however the subject is not taken into consideration, many sentences contained only one nominal element with verbs, in the early dialects as well as in PIE.

The Injunctive has long been identified as a form unmarked for mood and marked only for stem and person. It may thus be compared with the simplest form of OV languages.

 By contrast the Present indicative indicates “mood”. We associate this additional feature with the suffix -i, and assume for it declarative meaning.