Forthcoming: Deadjectival verb formation in Indo-European and beyond

Laura Grestenberger (ed), Viktoria Reiter (ed), Melanie Malzahn (ed)

Synopsis

The lexicalization of property concepts (PCs) — basic adjectival states such as big, small, hard, soft, black, white, fast, quick — has long been a central concern of both typology and linguistic theory. In historical Indo-European linguistics, PCs are most often examined through the lens of the “Caland System”, a complex derivational network of suffixes that structure the expression of such concepts. Yet while the nominal and adjectival exponents of this system have been intensively studied, their verbal counterparts remain comparatively underexplored. This volume takes up that challenge by asking: which classes of adjectives serve as inputs to verbalization, what syntactic and semantic alternations emerge in these derived verbs, and what do these patterns reveal about the status of “adjectival roots” in Indo-European and beyond? The contributions collected here investigate the morphology, syntax, and semantics of deadjectival verbs across the older Indo-European languages. By situating these formations within the broader typology of adjective derivation, property concept encoding, and primary vs. secondary verb formation, the volume forges new connections between typological generalizations, theoretical models, and historical-comparative evidence. In doing so, it not only illuminates the dynamics of verbal derivation in Indo-European but also advances our understanding of how the pathways from property concepts to verbal predicates are structured cross-linguistically.

Chapters

  • Introduction
    Deadjectival verb formation in Indo-European and beyond
    Viktoria Reiter, Laura Grestenberger, Melanie Malzahn
  • To be or to become, that is the question
    Word formation of the weak verbs formed from color adjectives in Old West Norse
    Ramón Boldt
  • Caland verbs in Celtic
    Stefan Höfler, David Stifter
  • The relationship between u-adjectives and nu-causatives in Anatolian
    David Sasseville
  • Balto-Slavic denominatives from an Indo-European perspective
    An update
    Miguel Villanueva Svensson
  • Delocatival adjectives surfacing as participles
    Romain Garnier
  • De-adjectival and de-“adjectival”
    Greek κρύπτω ‘cover’ and Proto-Germanic *χreuðaną ‘deck, equip, adorn’
    Andrew Merritt
  • Reassessing the emergence of the PIE *-eh₂-factitive present type
    Georges-Jean Pinault
  • A Late Nuclear Proto-Indo-European verbal type
    Intransitive thematic nasal-infix present actives
    Jeremy Rau
  • Diachronic trends in the formation of Italian deadjectival verbs
    Claudio Iacobini, Maria Pina De Rosa
  • Deriving the Akkadian Stative
    A deadjectival verb?
    Iris Kamil

Biographies

Laura Grestenberger

Laura Grestenberger is assistant professor of Diachronic Syntax at the University of Vienna and PI of the ERC project “The Evolution of Morphosyntactic Categorization” (EVOCAT). Her research focuses on comparative Indo-European morphology and syntax, language change, and morphological and syntactic theory.

Viktoria Reiter

Viktoria Reiter is a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Vienna. Building on her MA thesis on the formation of deadjectival verbs in Proto-Slavic, her PhD thesis examines secondary verb formation in Slavic and Indo-European from a historical-comparative perspective.

Melanie Malzahn

Melanie Malzahn is professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her main research focus is the development of the Indo-European nominal and verbal system and comparative philology of Tocharian and Vedic.

Book cover

Published

September 23, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Advances in Historical Linguistics

Online ISSN

2943-064X

Print ISSN

2943-0550
Cite as
Grestenberger, Laura, Reiter, Viktoria & Malzahn, Melanie (eds.). Forthcoming. Deadjectival verb formation in Indo-European and beyond. (Advances in Historical Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Laura Grestenberger, Viktoria Reiter, Melanie Malzahn; Ramón Boldt, Stefan Höfler, David Stifter, David Sasseville, Miguel Villanueva Svensson, Romain Garnier, Andrew Merritt, Georges-Jean Pinault, Jeremy Rau, Claudio Iacobini, Maria Pina De Rosa, Iris Kamil

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.