Verb morphosyntactic categories

PIE verb aspect

Grammatical aspect was an important part of the PIE verb. Though it originally appears to have been derivational rather than inflectional in its morphology (see Early PIE), by Nuclear IE it had been reorganized into a “tighter inflectional system”¹ Aspect was reflected by PIE conjugation.

Early PIE

In early stages of PIE, grammatical aspect was based on the opposition of inherently perfective and imperfective stems, where it was often possible to derive a perfective verb from an imperfective stem and vice versa.². Thus, PIE aspect was originally derivational rather than inflectional.

• Perfective — Disregards the “internal structure” of an event, implying lack of knowledge or interest in those details by the speaker. The perfective could still have ”present” tense forms, but since occurring in the present would impose internal structure, this would instead refer to habitualness or what will have taken place in the immediate future.
• Imperfective — Includes the inner structure of an event, e.g. duration, co-occurrence, attempt without completion, &c.
  • Stative — A special sub-category of imperfective verbs representing a state rather than an action. These could be derived, but base statives exhibited no special morphological characteristics.

Nuclear IE

By Nuclear IE the old derivational system was reorganised into an inflectional one, where each verb had between two and three stems for each aspect:

• Perfective → ”Aorist” — Basically the same function as above.
  • bʰúHt ”it became”
  • gʷémd ”he took a step”
  • luktó ”it got light”
  • mṛtó ”he disappeared/died”
• Imperfective → “Present”³ — Again similar to above, although it appears that in the past tense the present aspect may have represented attempted but uncompleted actions.⁴ They could also have stative meanings. Importantly, all derived verbs only had imperfective stems.⁵
  • gʷṃsḱéti ”he is walking” (repeated stepping)
  • bʰinédst ”he tried to split it” (past tense of present aspect)
  • bʰoréyeti ”he’s carrying it around”
  • h₁ésti ”he is”
  • gʷíh₃weti ”he is alive”
• Stative → ”Perfect”⁶ — In addition to aorist and present, Nuclear IE had a third, exclusively stative aspect.
  • wóyde ”he knows”
  • stestóh₂a ”he is standing upright”
  • dedwóye ”he is afraid”

Warning

Instead of using the traditional terms marked in quotes above, these notes opt for a more consistent approach, using the same names for both Proto- and Core aspects. The vast majority of literature on the subject continues to use terms aorist, present, and perfect, including (reluctantly) Ringe.

Key

• traditionally aorist ::: actually perfective
• traditionally present ::: actually imperfective
• traditionally perfect ::: actually stative

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tidy | en | sembr | morphology

Footnotes

1. 2017. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 27 ↩

2. To contrast, in Hittite stems were neutral where perfective and imperfective forms could be created with derivational suffixes. ↩

3. An unfortunate traditional name for the aspect given that it still came in present and past tense. ↩

4. Based on evidence in the aspect system of Ancient Greek. ↩

5. 2017, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 30 ↩

6. Again an unfortunate tradition since in PIE the stative was a sub-category of imperfective. ↩