Hittite pai- ‘come’ and uwa- ‘go’ as Restructuring Verbs

The present article provides a new syntactic analysis of the Hittite phraseological construction involving the verbs pai- ‘come’ or uwa- ‘go’ and a second finite verb. Most approaches have treated the construction as monoclausal in terms of verb serialization (Garrett 1990). This study will take a different approach, arguing that pai- and uwa- select a phrasal complement. The features that apparently set the construction apart from other cases of embedding in Hittite will be explained as effects of Restructuring (Rizzi 1982), a phenomenon Hittite also exhibits outside of the construction in question. It will further be argued that uwa- functions as a raising verb while pai- functions as a control verb, accounting for the differences in syntactic behavior between the two.

Published online: 02 August 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.3.1.05kol