Noun Formation in Indo-European

While the subject of nominal word formation has been the subject of several monographs in recent years, these works typically concentrate on either a specific language or language branch (e.g. Elisabeth Rieken: Untersuchungen zur nominalen Stammbildung im Hethitischen, 1999, or Antje Casaretto: Nominale Stammbildung der gotischen Sprache, 2004) or a specific suffix or group of suffixes (e.g. Karin Stüber: Die primären s-Stämme des Indogermanischen, 2002), and since Karl Brugmann’s classic study from 1906 (Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indo­ger­ma­ni­schen Sprachen, Bd. II.1), no complete account of the Indo-European inventory of noun suffixes has appeared.

The pres­ent project intends to fill this gap with a survey of all major derivational types and their most important continuations into the individual branches of the Indo-European family. The work will include observations concerning the internal phonetic/phonological and functional relation between groups of internally related suffixes, and discussions of such much-debated subjects as “the Caland complex” and “internal derivation”.

Scholar in charge

Birgit Anette Rasmussen (Olsen)