ABSTRACT PROVVISORIO IN ATTESA DI QUELLO GIUSTO

This paper deals with the expression of plurality in Thai, a classifier language part of the controversial Tai-Kadai family. Although it does not present a specific morphological mark of number, as it is usually the case in classifier languages, Thai has four main morpho-syntactic strategies to express plurality. Apart from the bare nouns, which could function as singular or plural, Thai speakers may use reduplication, albeit only on a limited number of lexical entities, the insertion of the morpheme phûak ‘group’, and the creation of a complex noun structure with either a general quantifier or a numeral. These different strategies will be presented by stressing their correlation with the syntactic structure of the noun phrase and the relation between the number/quantifier and the classifier, by arguing that these strategies correspond to different types of plural markers.

It is argued that Arm. zowr ‘vain’ is the derivational basis of zroyc‘ ‘talk’ with a semantic shift from ‘idle talk’ to ‘talk’. -oyc‘ may be a case-form of a decasuative derivative of the underlying nominal zowr, i.e., *zroy → *zroyk‘, zroyc‘.

As is well-known, the descriptive grammars of the European languages started to regularly include a chapter on word-formation after Bopp’s work (Lindner 2015). However, the grammars of the Semitic languages, the philosophical grammars of German, the grammars of Sanskrit and some missionary grammars include such chapter even before Bopp. Among these, the German grammars were subject to some recent studies (Alfieri 2018, 2019), while the remaining groups of grammars have never been discussed in this perspective. The present paper aims to fill the gap by analysing the treatment of word-formation in the grammars of Sanskrit written before Bopp (1827).

This paper examines two Greek inscriptions written in Babylon during the Parthian period with specific focus on the sections containing double dating formulas. Unfortunately, both inscriptions – particularly the first – are damaged. This paper shows that strong evidence in favor of one of the text reconstructions proposed by scholars can be obtained by means of an analysis combiningthe methods and tools of philology and historical (socio)linguistics. Evidence from other languages is also considered.

In 1912 Antoine Meillet published a paper, L’évolution des forms grammaticales, that turned out to be one of the most inspiring contributions in the entire history of linguistics. In the present paper it is suggested that some of the ideas in Meillet’s article were probably stimulated by a letter unpublished so far that was sent to him by Ernesto Rignano, one of the co-editors of Scientia. the journal in which the article was published. The present paper is divided into two parts: in the first, Meillet’s paper will be analysed carefully and the conceptually relevant points will be highlighted, whereas in the second part the text of Rignano’s letter will be briefly commented on, stressing the points that could have stimulated some of Meillet’s reflections on grammaticalization.