REVIEWS

Die Prbensklassen des germanischen schwachen Verbums. Studicn zur lexikalischm Morphologie und Semantik. By Peter Kramer. Innsbrucker Beitrage zur Sprach- wissenschaft. Ed. Wolfgang Meid. Bd. 5 . 145 pp. Institut fur vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft der Universidt Innsbruck, 1971. Sch. 160,-.

This elegant and economical monograph, comprising 71 pages of exposition and 53 of notes, begins by tracing the LE sources of the forms of the Gmc. present classes. It then proceeds to the ‘semantic morphology’ of the Gmc. verbal system and, in connection with the nasal presents, adds a brief sketch of Balto-Slavonic conditions. The development of the Gmc. system is then followed in the WGmc. languages, among which the author singles out OHG for special attention. To his treatment of OHG he appends, by way of corroborating his findings, a desaip tion of the conditions obtaining in the present-day OHG of the Valois dialects. The cursory treatment of the other Wmc. languages and the almost complete disregard of ON are justified by the author’s concern with the efflorescence rather than the decay ofthe Gmc. system, but there are illuminating remarks in the notes on subsequent English and Norse developments.

A valuable feature of the study is Kramer‘s application of the notion that, while each class of weak verbs in Gmc. had a broad semantic identity, this was clearly defined only through the play of morphemic oppositions. He believes (p. 35) that ‘alle Versuche, germanische Verbalmorpheme als Trager gk l i ch einheitlicher aktioneller Klassenbedeutungen bestimmen zu wollen, nie vollig gelingen konnen’. Thus, the causative-factitive character of Class 1 and the inchoa- tive character of Class IV mutually su port each other (at least in Gothic: there is

nearly every verb in -nan has a partner in +an. There is a similar opposition between primary strong verbs in -an and causatives in y’an; this accounts neatly (p. 28 f.) for the dropping of thej-present in Go. ligan and sitan, which have causative partners, but not in those verbs which have none. The consideration that, in the absence of such o positions, a post-adjectival jan-verb might have a less specific

baljjan andgairnjan, which look like factitive but are not. It would not, on the other hand, account for sildaleikjan, which is parmered by sildaleiknan, unless one envisages ‘marvelling at’ something as a mode of ‘makin it marvellous’. Krfmer

Pursuing the notion that semantic precision arises from regular morphemic opposition, the author shows how OHG created its own inchoative class by adding the prefix ir- to &verbs which without it were merely statal (durative or inchoative). Thus in the airfile% : i f i l t n the former is the unmarked member (‘putrere’ and ‘putrescere$, while the latter is marked as ‘only inchoative’ (‘con- putrescere’). This semantic pattern has not been systematized into a durative- inchoative opposition: the only pair cited by Kriimer which exhibits such an opposition is uuacht?n : inruuchh. (It is interesting to note that the post-adjectival component in this OHG class was so strong as to extract from this last pair by back-formation a new adjective wuch.) Again one appreciates Krgmer’s contention that opposition of forms is more important than the forms themselves when one

a parallel in OHG, where Classes I an B I11 partly contrast in the same way) because

semantic link wit K its base adjective would account for such anomalies as Go.

is, however, less concerned with the exceptions than with s e underlying regularity.