Williams Hugh. An historical study of the Proto-Indo-European nominal derivational morpheme *-ti-

University of Canterbury, 2019. — 232 p.In this thesis I shall be discussing the nominal derivation suffix in *-ti- which has a fairly major role in many of the so-called “late” Proto-Indo-European (Proto-Indo-European hereafter may be abbreviated as PIE) languages–especially in forming action and result nouns. I shall first give a thorough literature review which will examine the various threads of scholarship up to the present day, focussing particularly on notions of form and function. Much of the scholarship predated the discovery and decipherment of the Anatolian languages, which are among the oldest attested Indo- European languages, so I feel that there is a need for such a discussion. The likely fact that Anatolian split off from Proto-Indo-European much earlier than the other Indo-European families and the potential that it preserves a much better and more archaic picture of early Proto-Indo-European really drives this need for an overhaul of scholarship. Following my literature review I will discuss some linguistic theories that seem particularly relevant. I will begin with a discussion on phonological matters (including accent and ablaut) and follow on with those concerning semantics. In particular I introduce the theory of grammaticalization. I believe that Proto-Indo-European had a morpheme in *- ti- that was used to form instrumental and ablative case endings, which had developed from the morpheme in *-ti that helped to form instrumental and ablatival adverbs. This is important because I ultimately try to show that this morpheme is not to be connected with the *-ti- nominal derivational morpheme. Following my linguistic discussion, I shall discuss many of the individual Indo-European language families. For different reasons I neglect Balto-Slavic, Tocharian, and Armenian: I leave out Balto-Slavic because of my incompetence in modern Baltic and Slavic languages (the works in German and English I did not find particularly helpful); I leave out Armenian and Tocharian partly because of unfamiliarity with these languages, and partly because I could not see a lot of evidence one way or the other that the ti-stems existed in these languages (I assume they were in Armenian, but you can seldom be sure what you are dealing with one because of phonetic developments). A major theme central to a number of different theories regarding the ti-stems1 is that the ti- stems are closely linked with the formation of compound nouns (e.g. usually preverb + (root + suffix)). Looking at the oldest stages of many Indo-European language families, I have found that this is not the case at all. In fact, in the earliest stages of Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Italic, and Vedic, there is a marked tendency for any given verbal root to produce ti-stem simplex (non-compound) rather than a ti-stem complex (compound). The only exception I found to this was in the Iranian family.