Timeline for What sort of "root" patterns do languages have that don't have infinitive verbs?
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| Apr 23, 2021 at 20:33 | vote | accept | Lance Pollard | ||
| Dec 21, 2020 at 10:03 | comment | added | Tristan | @JanusBahsJacquet it's pretty common. 3sg masc perfective/past (exact sense depending on language) is usually the simplest form of the verb, and most stems can be derived fairly predictably from it. Modern Hebrew dictionaries often use the infinitive instead, but this is pretty much just adding the prefix lə- "to", with some regular morphophonological alternations | |
| Dec 19, 2020 at 0:22 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Tristan Classical Sanskrit dictionaries will generally use the root (so you’ll look up kr̥-, not kr̥nóti), but some other sources will give the present form. Amharic uses 3rd sg masc perfect as well (is this a general thing in Semitic?). | |
| Dec 18, 2020 at 13:22 | history | edited | Tristan | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 18, 2020 at 13:21 | comment | added | Tristan | huh, I could have sworn Russian used 3sg present, but you are right, they do seem to use infinitives. What I've seen of Sanskrit does seem to use 3sg present active indicative, but as this seems to be contentious I'll replace it with Modern Arabic dictionaries using the 3sg masculine past | |
| Dec 18, 2020 at 12:42 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | Russian always uses infinitives as citation forms. And as far as I know, Sanskrit uses bare roots for that purpose. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 14:17 | comment | added | Tristan | in particular, distinguishing infinitives from verbal nouns, adjectives, and adverbs seems pretty tricky to me and I'm not sure any such distinction really exists in general. In practice, non-finite forms seem to be any verb forms that carries less information than a fully conjugated verb form (in the case of Latin & Greek, they don't carry information on person, and infinitives don't carry information on number), and infinitive largely seems to be a grab-bag for any non-finite form that doesn't fit a more well defined subcategory (like verbal nouns, or adjectives) | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 14:13 | comment | added | Tristan | @curiousdannii infinitive is a very poorly defined term tbh. The Latin infinitives are kinda complicated by the fact that the future infinitives are really combinations of present infinitives and a participle. The perfect participle is strictly distinguished from the present participle on aspect though as you say. Ancient Greek does have genuine future infinitives though, as Janus says. And these are essentially the prototypical examples of what an infinitive is, with the definition being constructed around them | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 14:10 | comment | added | curiousdannii♦ | @Janus I realised that perhaps what's happening is that infinitives with relative tenses is possible. I still think it would be nonsensical to talk about an infinitive with absolute tense however. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 13:33 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @curiousdannii Classical Ancient Greek absolutely does have future infinitives (e.g., λυσεῖν from λύω); so does Koine, though it does become exceedingly rare during the Koine period. They are morphologically parallel to the other infinitives, and they are used exactly as infinitives. The Latin ones are compound forms (future participle + esse in the active, iri in the passive), but they are still infinitives and formable from any verb that can form future-tense forms. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 13:28 | comment | added | curiousdannii♦ | @JanusBahsJacquet Then they're not infinitives... must be something else. (I know some Koine Greek and it has different aspect infinitives, but not a future infinitive.) | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 13:24 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @curiousdannii Latin future infinitives are tensed (unless you consider the Latin future to be an aspect, which is not standard as far as I know), as are Greek future infinitives (though the Greek future does have some aspect-like properties, so it’s perhaps less unambiguously tensed). I’m sure there are other cases of infinitives that are tensed too, cross-linguistically. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 12:47 | comment | added | curiousdannii♦ | "These may be distinguished by tense and voice" Aspect and voice, surely? The one defining feature of infinitives is that they don't have tense! More generally, principle parts are a way of teaching and learning languages, but they don't actually define the languages' grammars. In many languages there's an infinitive affix added to roots just like any other TAM affixes. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 10:27 | history | edited | Tristan | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 15, 2020 at 10:18 | history | answered | Tristan | CC BY-SA 4.0 |