Disterheft Dorothy. The Syntactic Development of the Infinitive in Indo-European

Slavica Publishers, 1980. — 226 p.The morphology of the infinitive in three Indo-European groups, Indo-Iranian, Celtic, and Hittite, suggests that they may share similar features: they differ from the rest of the Indo-European languages in that they use more than one infinitive (unmarked for tense/voice). The first two groups for the most part retain membership in nominal paradigms, reflecting the reconstruction of the Indo-European infinitive as a wide variety of oblique verbal abstracts in Proto-Indo-European. A primary aim of this study is to examine the syntactic shift from the Proto-Indo-European verbal abstract to the infinitive in the various daughter languages, to reconstruct the syntax of the infinitive/verbal abstract, and to propose a relative chronology of various infinitive features (word order, voice, etc.) and constructions in Indo-European. The first step in the comparison of these three language groups is the description of infinitival syntax for Vedic Sanskrit (Rigveda), Old Iranian (Avesta), Old Irish, and Hittite. The features focused upon are the relationship of noun phrases within the clause to the infinitive, i.e. treatment of subordinate subject and object case selection.