La particule gotique ga- : de l'espace à l'aspect et de l'aspect à la fonction jonctive
Résumé
This article offers a contribution to the study of the Gothic particle ga-. The problematics of aspectual marking, a function traditionally attributed to this particle ever since Streitberg (1891) — who analyzed ga- as a marker of perfectivity —, are reconsidered in the context of a very archaic syntax. By means of this approach, the original status of this “pre-verb” as an Indo-European sentence particle can be restored. Ga- can thereby be detached from its verbal base — ga- having indeed been able to occur as an autonomous word accompanied by an enclitic and detached from the verb. Instead of limiting the incidence of ga- to a verbal frame and its function to that of a “perfective” aspectual marker, we will see that ga- can establish logical connections between utterances. These connections vary in value from “unifying” parataxis (a duality unified into a whole) to correlative links of a telic, causal or consecutive type.
Keywords :
Semantic function, Grammatical function, Connector, Distributional analysis, Verb, Verbal aspect, Particle, Preverb, Historical linguistics