Zer da lehenago, aditzoina ala partizipioa? Oharrak euskararen kronologiarako

Abstract

In this work I hope to look more deeply at the relationship between the root and the participle of Basque verbs. We will see with the help of a range of evidence that the opposition between them has more nuances diachronically speaking than it seems to have from the synchronic point of view and that basically what we see in historical Basque cannot simply be assumed to be the case in Proto Basque. Therefore, I will attempt to prove a stronger hypothesis i.e. that the historical verb root is a consequence of the morphologization of the irregularities which brought about the phonetic changes that altered the point of merger of compounds and derivatives prior to the first medieval documents. Apart from attempting to shed some light on some other hitherto unexplained phenomena such as the type of *emanite verbal nouns proposed by Trask (1990), this hypothesis also gives us the opportunity to increase our understanding of the birth, nature and chronology of other phenomena related to the make up of the historical verbal system such as the periphrastic perfect and the pleonastic participles in -itu.