Leiden University Student Repository

Fontana, Alessandro (2022)

The Proto-Indo-European anaphoric and relative pronouns: analysis and considerations

Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)

The present thesis will deal with the proto-Indo-European anaphoric and relative pronouns, and their possible shared origin. The discussion will be based on a large repertoire of relevant lexical entries from the whole Indo-European family, to reconstruct the most accurate pronominal paradigm and its phonology. This overhauled paradigm will be studied to extrapolate a relative chronology that will help to clarify the steps of its creation in pre-Proto-Indo-European and its differentiation between the relative and anaphoric pronoun. In the final chapters, the anaphoric pronoun will be analyzed under the lenses of the ergative theory and will be compared with the verbal augment, to determine whether they derive from the same hypothetical deictic particle. Finally, the pre-Proto-Indo-European reconstruction of the anaphoric pronoun will be compared with the Proto-Uralic pronominal repertoire to determine whether it was inherited from Proto-Indo-Uralic.

deictic pronouns

proto-Indo-Anatolian

proto-Indo-European

anaphoric pronouns

pronouns

Author

Fontana, Alessandro

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Indo-European Linguistics

Supervisors

Tijmen Pronk

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en