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The Indo-European languages of Anatolia in the second and first millennium B. C. share the following typological particularity: The beginning of the sentence shows a chain containing sentential particles, pronominal elements and local particles (referred to as “PPC”). This PPC has a fixed inner order. Our aim is to explain the emergence of the PPC and to verifiably judge the question to which degree the PPC is inherited. Therefore, we investigate the structural differences within individual languages’ PPCs and try to reconstruct the basic PPC-structure common to all Ancient Anatolian languages. Our approach is fundamentally sustained by new considerations concerning the discrepancy between (1) the phonological realization of the PPC and (2) the potential diversity in the underlying syntactic structure, which hitherto has mostly been ignored. We succeed in presenting evidence that, for the potential formation of the basic PPC-structure, not only Wackernagel’s Law plays a crucial role, but at least two further mainly (morpho-)phonological processes are crucial. Our findings lead to a better understanding of Common Anatolian phrase structure.

The method of comparative reconstruction is considered as the best instrument to reveal the prehistory of individual languages or linguistic families. It is inductive (data-driven) and seems to be much more reliable as the concurring method of internal reconstruction. Still it has been overlooked that each comparative reconstruction - to be innovative - has to be based on an initial premise. Such a premise is always the result of an abductive conclusion as used in internal reconstruction. Thus each comparative reconstruction has a core consisting of internal reconstruction. For syntactical reconstruction the following premise seems to be suitable: Linguistic structures and their changes obey the principles of universal grammar (e. g. the Minimalistic Program) and of grammaticalization. This premise proves fruitful for the explanation of the Early Greek augment */e-/< *h1e-. The augment can be determined as an original particle in the CP layer of the sentence. Later on it is reanalysed as a temporal particle, becomes part of the vP and underlies univerbation with the verb.