verb form question

Greek Learning Greek
1

When dissecting a verb form, is this the most pieces it can have?

preverb-augment-stem-conj

Thanks.

2

It depends, I suppose, on what your dissection intends.

From a purely inflectional perspective the stem is defined as what’s left after removing the inflectional endings. Hence the the augment would be considered part of such an ‘inflectional stem’. More positively, the stem is equal to the root + affixes (prefixes and suffixes).

A stem can obviously be further analyzed into its root and affixes. These affixes may include markers for mood and tense, thematic vowels, etc.

Cordially,

Paul

3

Now that you mention it, I’d like the FULL analysis. If that means
that [size=150]ἀπελύομεν[/size] gets broken up into:

preverb: [size=150]ἀπ[/size]
augment: [size=150]ε[/size]
stem: [size=150]λυ[/size]
athematic: [size=150]ο[/size]
primary ending: [size=150]μεν[/size]

My further question is does it get more complicated than this? I’m leaving out things like vowel contraction or lengthening. I just want to know about the component pieces.

Thanks.

4

(I think you mean thematic (vowel) or, as I learned it, connecting vowel.

It can have an additional category if the tense stem is different from the root. That does not happen with [size=150]λύω[/size].
[size=150]ἀποθνῄσκω [/size]
pre-verb: [size=150]απο[/size]
tense stem:[size=150]θνῃ[/size]
root:[size=150]θαν[/size]
ending appended to stem:[size=150]σκ[/size] (I assume that this originates from the iterative ending. Hard to picture given the meaning of the verb.)
thematic vowel:o
personal ending:none
(The thematic vowel compensates for the lack of personal ending by lengthening from o to ω.)

I think the above is correct but if not, I am eager to see the corrections.

5

Because the stem may contain markers for tense, voice, and mood the complexity of its decomposition will depend on the form itself.

I would not include the “preverb” in such an analysis. So-called preverbs were once independent particles. They happened to get captured by a verb’s “gravity”. As compounds they contribute to the lexical stem, not the inflectional stem.

Cordially,

Paul

6

Hi Bert,

I think it is now generally held that PIE had a laryngeal conjugation. Some linguists conjecture that its first person singular present active ended in -o-H. The ‘o’ is the thematic vowel; the H (the h2 laryngeal) represents the personal ending. On this account the lengthening of the theme vowel is the result of the loss of the laryngeal.

Cordially,

Paul

7

Can you elaborate on this some more? I looked through my middle liddell and would have had no indication that such a deconstruction of the verb would be necessary.

8

It shouldn’t be for your purposes! Just store the fully-formed stems, otherwise you’ll have to account for suppletion as a special case. We all know how stable programming special cases is.