Apposition and Nominal Classification in Indo-European and Beyond

The present monograph examines appositional collocations in older Indo-European languages, a topic which has remained virtually unstudied in Indo- European linguistics since Eduard Schwyzer’s “Zur Apposition” (1947). Part One is devoted to unextended apposition and its position in the noun phrase in Indo- European. After an extensive collection of linguistic data from Anatolian, Tocharian, Celtiberian, and Mycenaean Greek (with special consideration given to formulaic collocations), there follows an investigation of the syntactic and semantic principles underlying the placement of apposition, drawing upon comparative data from non-Indo-European languages. Part Two focuses on collocations consisting of numeral, appositional determiner, and counted item. Such collocations are not only well-attested crosslinguistically, but are also reconstructible in certain cases for Proto-Indo-European and shed important light on the evolution of numeral classifiers in modern Indo-European as well as non- Indo-European languages. The “phraseoIogization” of collocations of numeral and appositional determiner is documented already in older lndo-European languages and constitutes the preliminary stage for the grammaticalization of numeral classifiers, found in certain modern lndo-Aiyan languages (e.g. Bengali) and especially outside Indo-European. By demonstrating the existence of a developmental path leading from habitual collocation to syntactic construction, these case studies support the continuum, long postulated in theoretical linguistics, between lexicon and syntax.