INHERENT TELICITY AND PROTO- INDO-EUROPEAN VERBAL PARADIGMS

In recent aspectual classi}cations telicity is described as a compositional syntactic property, and verbs are analyzed as complex structures made up of completely neutral roots. However, semantic changes due to both derivational processes and di‰erent syntactic contexts could have obscured the relationship between root lexical aspect and verb morphological paradigms. The purpose of this paper is to show that telicity can be considered as an inherent lexical property: the co-occurrence in a sentence with arguments, adverbials or speci}c pragmatic contexts which can (de)telicize the event described by a verb has consequences at syntactic level, whereas the prototypical aspect of the root is preserved at morphological, i.e. in~ectional level. After comparing Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek verbs derived from roots belonging to the Proto-Indo-European basic lexicon, I will argue how it is possible to determine inherent telicity according to the distribution of in~ected forms within earlier paradigms in a diachronic perspective.