Root lexical features and inflectional marking of tense in Proto-Indo-European

This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition. The dispute over this issue is well-known; it has been pursued mostly by scholars following various general linguistic approaches, from typology to acquisition, but also by historical linguists and Indo-Europeanists, who have long debated about the precedence of aspect or tense from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. However, so far Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a successful way with recent research in other fields such as acquisition or neurolinguistics. The aim of this paper is to put forward evidence from the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system concerning the prominent role of root lexical aspect features in the emergence of grammatical marking of tense in the protolanguage. More precisely, by means of a comparison between the residual archaic verbal forms of the injunctive in Vedic Sanskrit and the corresponding augmentless preterites in Homeric Greek, it will be argued that the [ + telic] lexical feature of the inherited verbal root is responsible for a non-random distribution of past tense inflected forms in an earlier verbal paradigm. The expression of temporal categories is a fundamental topic in the scientific study of language, from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. More than one approach must be integrated if one's aim is to put forward not only a description but also an adequate explanation of how such categories ultimately arise and develop in the grammatical system of a language, viz. in a speaker's mind. Hence I propose that historical data should be reasonably taken into account as well, so that new light may be shed on the core of the matter which is more often examined using a synchronic approach of both