On the Distribution of the Strong Preterite Plural and the Preterite-Present Present Plural Forms in the Proto-Germanic Verb System

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The aim of this paper is to provide a new idea upon the issue of what formations can be reconstructed at the Proto-Germanic stage for the strong class I-VI preterite plural system and for the preterite-present present plural system, after offering an outline sketch of a ‘morphological conflation’ model which is designed to explain how the system of the Germanic strong and preteritepresent verbs grew out of the Proto-Indo-European verb system. The current paper focuses on the fact that, although the preterite tense formations of the strong verbs and the present tense formations of the preteritepresent verbs in ancient Germanic languages and Proto-Germanic tend to be similar in form, there seem to be two crucial morpho(phono)logical differences: (A) Class IV and V plural formations of the two distinct verbs at issue show an outstanding morphological discrepancy, as represented below: strong preterite plurals preterite-present present plurals having a long vowel in the root pointing to an original zero-grade radix Class IV *bǣr-un ‘they bore, carried’ *skul-un ‘they owe, shall, should’ < pre-PGmc. *bhēr-n̥t < pre-PGmc. *skl̥-n̥t Class V *mǣt-un ‘they measured’ *nuǥ-un ‘they are enough, suffice’ < pre-PGmc. *mēd-n̥t < pre-PGmc. *nek̂-n̥t (B) As far as Gothic is concerned, strong class I-VI verbs do not exhibit any Verner’s law effect in their preterite plural formations (e.g. class V preterite plural wesun ‘they were’ but not †wezun), whereas two of the preterite-present verbs retain forms with an outcome of Verner’s law (e.g. áigum and áigun ‘we/they possess’ as well as þaúrbum, þaúrbuþ, þaúrbun ‘we/you/they need’). The proposed ‘morphological conflation’ model attempts to give a consistent, explanatory account of these two apparently non-interrelated phenomena in the following two terms: (C) The content of the morphological conflation theory in question a. The PGmc. strong preterite tense formation was created from an amalgamation of two types of the imperfect active (i.e. the acrostatic 1 and amphikinetic types) and the reduplicating perfect active. b. The PGmc. preterite-present present tense formation system arose from a mixture of the athematic present middle (more exactly, the medium tantum or root stativeintransitive present; or otherwise, the reduplicating perfect middle) and the reduplicating perfect active. Despite the necessarily limited empirical evidence that is available, only through such a conflation theory does it seem possible to account for the attested Germanic strong and preterite-present verb formations. As predicted by the proposed morphological conflation theory, this paper reaches the conclusion that the preterite plural of a class I-VI strong verb may have had two allomorphic formations such as *wǣzun and *wǣsun ‘they were’ (class V), whereas the present plural of a preterite-present verb must have had a single formation such as *þurƀun (but not †þurfun) ‘they need’, in the Proto- Germanic verb system.

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  • 英語英文学論叢

    英語英文学論叢 70 33-51, 2020-03-19

    九州大学大学院言語文化研究院英語科

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