Das hethitische -ant-Partizip und seine indogermanischen Grundlagen – Semantik, Morphologie, Syntax

This thesis treats the Hittite participle formation in -ant-, taking into account all grammatical dimensions, i.e. morphology, semantics and syntax. The Hittite -ant-participle is cognate to the Indo-European (i.e. non-Anatolian Indo-European) -nt-participle, with which it is formally identical regarding inflexion as well as derivational morphology: just like its Proto-Indo-European proto-type, the Hittite -ant-participle inflects athematically and exhibits the outcome of either *-ont- or *-nt-, the former being the original strong stem alternant, the latter the original weak stem alternant of the paradigm with an apophonic suffix *-ont- / *-nt-. Neither in the other Indo-European languages nor in Hittite itself there is any evidence for an e-grade variant *-ent-, which was hitherto reconstructed as the strong stem alternant, mostly on theoretical grounds instead of on actual formal evidence. The Hittite evidence explicitly contradicts this claim, as *-ent- does not yield Hittite -ānt- with long vowel as is often attested in Hittite throughout but most frequently in Old Hittite. Even though the Hittite -ant-participle morphologically equals the Indo-European -nt-participle, there is a strong deviation between the two regarding the semantics of this formation. The Indo-European -nt-participle is always contemporary and subject-oriented (i.e. active), hence it is commonly called a present-active participle. The Hittite -ant-participle, however, exhibits varying semantics dependent on the underlying verbal stem. The current account in the handbooks claims that it is passive (i.e. object-oriented) with transitive verbs, but active (i.e. subject-oriented) with intransitive verbs. This description is, however, insufficient, since it ignores the difference in temporal relation of the -ant-participle when derived from either telic or atelic verbs respectively. The method of description used in this thesis is neither based on valency, nor on telicity but on the four basic aktionsart-types postulated by Vendler: states (p.e. be angry), activities (sleep), achievements (die), accomplishments (kill). Thus it is possible to easily account for the temporal relation and the orientation at the same time, with the -ant-participle being contemporary and subject-oriented with stative verbs and activity verbs ([being] angry, sleeping), preterital and subject-oriented with achievement verbs (died), and preterital and object-oriented with accomplishment verbs (killed). The aberrant semantics of the Hittite -ant-participle vis-à-vis its Indo-European cognate are to be interpreted as an Anatolian innovation induced by language contact with a pre-form of Hurrian, a neighbour of Hittite in historical as well as pre-historical times. On the syntactic side the Hittite -ant-participle differs only slightly from the Indo-European -nt-participle with the adverbal (conjunct) usage being less frequent than in the classical languages such as Greek and Latin, but also Sanskrit. This difference in usage is, however, a direct consequence of the innovative semantics, since past passive participle (i.e. preterital object-oriented participles) are much less frequently used as conjunct participles.