The Origin and development of adpositions and adpositional phrases in the Indo-European languages

ENPrepositions and postpositions are among the most heavily-employed lexemes in any given Indo-European language. And their lack of inflection in a language family in which morphosyntactic relations are in great measure expressed through elaborate inflectional systems is immediately striking. How these lexemes arrived at such a state, and how they are affected by and participate in the grammatical and syntactic changes experienced by all languages, are questions calling out for investigation. While A. Meillet has demonstrated the nominal origins of many prominent Indo-European adpositions, complete with firm evidence that several attested adpositions represent various noun case-forms or even significant portions of nominal paradigms, but a great many details have yet to be explained on this point. Furthermore, a particularly fascinating feature of the various branches of the Indo-European family has barely been addressed: While most of the earliest attested daughter languages, are almost exclusively prepositional in their syntactic placement of adpositional phrases, others, are mostly postpositional. A small number, such as Luwian, Umbrian and Old Lithuanian, show a substantial number of both varieties, and evidence in these languages indicates that a change in word order from postpositions to prepositions is in progress. The processes involved in this rather surprising state of affairs call for detailed study, especially given evidence that change in the word order of the adpositional phrase is one of the first steps in a general syntactic change among the Indo-European languages.The present investigation, then, will seek a greater understanding of the steps that marked this process of word order change, as well as, insofar as is possible to ascertain, the conditions that set it in motion. Possible implications for linguistic and especially syntactic universal will also be eagerly sought after. For the present exercise, concentration will be focused upon those languages offering particular insight into the origins of these items, above all Hittite, or presenting substantial evidence of an adpositional word order shift in progress. These include Luwian and Lydan, Umbrian and other Italic languages, and Old Lithuanian and the rest of the Baltic subgroup.