In ancient Indo-European languages, the infinitive arises from the grammaticalization of a deverbal noun as a part of the verbal paradigm (Kuryłowicz 1964: 158-170; Bauer 2000: 337-349; Kapović 2017: 104; Lundquist & Yates 2018: 2110). This process is somehow completed in some languages (Latin, Ancient Greek), where the infinitive shows the accusative government (Lat. mulcere dedit fluctus ‘(he) allowed (you) to rule the sea’ Verg. Aen. 1.66; Gk. líssom’ Akhillêï methémen khólon ‘I beg (you) to let go (your) anger against Achilles’ A, 283), while still ongoing in others (Vedic, Avestan), where it shows both genitive and accusative government (Ved. kó […] gāt práṣṭum etát ‘who will go to ask it?’ RV. 1.164.4d; dhánānām sātáye ‘for the conquering of wealth’ RV. 1.4.9c). As a result, the infinitive has acquired a consistent number of verbal categories in Greek and Latin (namely, tense, aspect and diathesis: Panagl 1987; Fabrizio 2018a-b-c), unlike in Vedic (García Ramón 1995, 1997, 2009; Lazzeroni 2012; Keydana 2013): as such, it is conceivable as an action noun (Comrie & Thompson 1985) and cross-linguistically as an Action-Argument (in Croft’s terms: Croft 2001).
This contribution aims at: 1) investigating the morphological encoding of the ActionArgument correlation in three ancient Indo-European languages: Rgvedic Sanskrit, Homeric Greek, and Early Latin; 2) giving an account of the process of word-class change that the infinitive undergoes
To do so, following the methodology adopted by Alfieri (2020), we collect at least 100 tokens of Action-Arguments in each language and carry out a morpho-semantic analysis of the means with which it is encoded (e.g., the kind of suffixes involved; Spevak 2022: 61-62), and a syntactic analysis of the government strategy. We expect to find both nominal strategies (i.e., primarily nominalizations by means of suffixes, with both accusative and genitive government, as Lat. -tio, -tus, Gk. -sis, -tis, tus, Skt. -ti, -tu) and verbal strategies (i.e., infinitives, with accusative government, as Lat. -are, -ari, -isse, Gk. -ein, -nai, -men, Skt. -tavai, -ase, -mane) to be adopted. We then put into relation the stage of grammaticalization of the infinitive (i.e., the degree of its integration into the verbal paradigm) in each language with the frequency of the different Action-Arguments found.
We expect to conclude that the word-class change of the infinitive takes place in the following scenarios: 1) in Vedic, where the infinitive is not fully grammaticalized, a wider variety of nominal strategies to encode the Action Arguments are found; 2) in Greek and Latin, where the infinitive mood has a higher degree of grammaticalization, the Action-Arguments are encoded more frequently with verbal strategies; 3) lastly, fewer but more specialized nominalization strategies are found in Greek and Latin, alongside the infinitive.
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