Un nuovo sguardo al verbo indoeuropeo

Reconstructing PIE verb morphology and its semantic, syntactic and pragmatic functional features has concerned language historians for two hundred years, and this issue is still debated. I am not going to recapitulate precisely every hypothesis that has been expressed over such a long period of time. I will though mention the opinions expressed by other scholars when they support or contradict the assumptions and solutions that I suggest in my disquisition. My hypothesis has primarily been developed on the basis of comparative observation and analysis of the morphological features of the verbal system of the attested ancient Indo-European languages, with due regard to their different phonological development. This hypothesis builds thus on the real language phenomenon and disregards a priori conceptualizations. It has arisen as a necessary result of a stream of thoughts, whose starting point is firmly anchored in the empirical evidence. Even the basic assumption of an original morphological expression of control on action by the subject, on which my explaining model is based, is not conceived as a theoretical a priori principle. On the contrary, it constitutes an interpretative way of addressing the objective situation presented by the morphophonological comparison of the verbal system of the considered languages, from a functional point of view. As a methodological principle, I intend to limit, as far as possible, speculation abstracted from the real ground of language data and to avoid ad hoc solutions in reconstructing. I rather endeavor to have a dialectical feedback from empirical evidence. For this reason, I also think it is most relevant to deal with the acquirements, which typological linguistics has made in the last decades. Taking the analysis of real languages as a starting point, typological linguistics has provided a useful universalist conceptual grid to classify language systems and has thus developed a certain capacity to predict the overall behaviors of such systems, considering in principle every aspect of linguistic analysis: pragmatics, syntax, morphology, phonology, and so on. Methodologically, it must be emphasized that my reconstruction hypothesis has been drawn up irrespective of the acquirements of typological linguistics, and that a comparison with its findings has been made as a corollary, in order to test the plausibility of my hypothesis on the PIE verbal system in the light of what generally is deemed to be functionally and structurally compatible with real languages.

L’indoeuropeistica trova ancora difficoltà a ricostruire in un insieme organico e coerente i connotati originari del sistema verbale della protolingua. Particolarmente spinosa a tal riguardo è la questione della doppia coniugazione del verbo nella lingua ittita (-mi vs. -hi) e di una sua possibile spiegazione diacronica che armonizzi con le categorie morfologiche e funzionali tradizionalmente desunte dalle altre lingue indoeuropee. Nel presente saggio, attraverso una rinnovata valutazione dei dati linguistici comparativi disponibili si giunge alla definizione di un modello ricostruttivo globale del sistema verbale protoindoeuropeo, di cui si delineano le categorie morfologiche e funzionali portanti. Anche l’assunto fondamentale di un’originaria espressione morfologica del controllo dell’azione da parte del soggetto, su cui poggia l’intero modello esplicativo qui proposto, non è concepito come principio teorico a priori, bensì costituisce una risposta interpretativa, in chiave funzionale, alla situazione che oggettivamente presenta la comparazione morfofonologica del sistema verbale delle lingue considerate. Si è poi inteso verificare, a posteriori, la plausibilità di questa nuova ipotesi sul sistema verbale protoindoeuropeo alla luce delle recenti acquisizioni della linguistica tipologica, intendendo accertare la compatibilità funzionale e strutturale del modello ricostruito con ciò che si ritiene possibile per le lingue reali.