Lehmann Winfred P. Proto-Indo-European Syntax

University of Texas Press, 1974. — 292 p.Syntax, the study of sentences, is generally held to be the heart of grammar. Whether or not, with students of language like Rudolf Carnap and Noam Chomsky, one takes semantics to be interpretive, phonology must be so viewed; and morphology deals with a subcomponent of syntax. Morphological and phonological studies must therefore be provisional unless carried out on the basis of a syntactic description. Yet most investigations dealing with the early Indo-European dialects and the reconstructed parent language are concerned with these subsidiary components of grammar. Proto-Indo-European Syntax has been written to remedy this shortcoming of Indo-European linguistics and to provide a syntax of the parent language.
Yet Proto-Indo-European Syntax is itself only a preliminary work. In spite of Berthold Delbrück’s excellent monographs and his syntax in the first edition of the Brugmann-Delbrück Grundriss, and in spite of excellent discussions of syntactic problems, such as those in Jacob Wackernagel’s Vorlesungen, no syntactic description of Proto-Indo-European has yet been written. In this situation a large-scale treatment did not seem desirable, but rather one which can lead to examination of major problems and individual syntactic constructions.