Indo-European Inroads into the Syntactic-Etymological Interface: A Reconstruction of the PIE verbal root *menkʷ- ‘to be short; to lack’ and its Argument Structure

Abstract

: In this article we report a previously unidentified verbal root for the Indo-European protolanguage, * menk ʷ - ‘to be short; to lack’, based on verbal and nominal reflexes in Italic, Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Tocharian and Anatolian, founded, we claim, in the Caland System , an archaic stratum of the Proto-Indo-European derivational system. In four of five Indo-European subgroups, predicates are found occurring with a subject(-like) argument in a non-nominative case, dative in the languages that have retained the Indo- European case morphology, but an oblique case in the branches where different non-nom-inative forms have merged. The documented verbal forms cannot be unified into a single reconstructable verb, yet we argue that the more abstract argument structure construction involving a dative subject(-like) argument must be inherited from Proto-Indo-European. Hence, we suggest a partial reconstruction for the grammar of Proto-Indo-European, based on the attested Tocharian form, * m(e)nk ʷ - MP , the non-nominative case of the sub- ject(-like) argument, and the meaning ‘lack’. Taken together, this cumulative evidence corroborates the assumption that a verb meaning ‘lack’ developed from ‘be short’ in the proto-language, indeed instantiating a non-canonically case-marked argument structure with its subject(-like) argument in the dative case.