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Verbal Reduplication in Anatolian

Abstract

Scholars have long suspected that the verbal reduplication patterns reflected in the Anatolian languages encode typologically expected imperfectivity and iconic expressivism. At the same time, Indo-Europeanists have looked to the Anatolian languages for relics of archaic reduplicated categories of marked semantics and shape. This dissertation provides a comprehensive examination of the forms and functions of the various Anatolian reduplicated verbs attested in the Hittite, Luvian, and Lycian languages. Following a typological survey to establish what exactly the “expected” semantics of reduplication in a verb are, the study then provides sketches for the semantics of all known Hittite, Luvian, and Lycian reduplicated verbs of sufficient attestation to do so. I then examine the formal history of all attested Anatolian reduplicated verbs, projecting their preforms as far back as able, and divide them according to their reduplicative patterns, commenting on the relative productivity of each. In the end, typologically trivial partial copy vowel reduplication proves to be the most productive pattern of verbal reduplication in the Anatolian languages, commonly used with habitual, durative, iterative, and other universally expected imperfective nuances. The same semantics obtain in the more marginal but also productive /i/-reduplication, a formal pattern inherited from Proto-Indo-European. Similarly inherited /e/-reduplication persists in some forms, with the same semantics seen in other partial reduplicative patterns in Anatolian. The majority of “expressive” reduplicated verbs are unpaired synchronically with a base stem, and frequently show full root reduplication. There are a handful of “intensive” reduplicated verbs with full root reduplication and a “linking” /i/, which may or may not be parallel to Vedic intensives of similar shape. The evidence overwhelmingly proves that the accent was firmly on the reduplicant in every category. A number of interesting facts emerge in the exploration of the Anatolian data. We see perhaps the emergence of new reduplicative categories in Hittite asās- / ases- and Lycian ppuwe-, while the distribution of Anatolian /i/-reduplication and the phonological history of /e/-reduplication has implications for the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system.

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