The project will focus on two specific categories that can be labelled as non-finite verbal forms, i.e., participles and infinitives. In our hypothesis, they may provide a specific – and in some way privileged – access to the analysis of non-finite verbal forms:
1) Participles are verbal formations with adjectival agreement features. Despite their wide functional range and distinctive position between verb and adjective, very little work exists on the syntax of participles as a distinct category. As non-finite verbal forms, participles are exclusively, or almost exclusively, used for embedded predications, i.e., to predicate some eventuality of some entity within the syntactic (and very often semantic) scope of another predication, usually that of the matrix verb. In ancient Indo-European languages participles perform various functions: there are syntactic conditions that distinguish pure adnominal modification from adverbial modification. In adverbial modification the participle does not only modify its head noun, but also the state of affairs encoded by the main predication. In order for a participle to have the value of adverbial modifier, it has to be either a conjunct participle or an absolute participle. We therefore intend to investigate the syntactic employment of participles, providing both a descriptive and a formal account of the syntactic contexts in which they occur.
2) Infinitives are a particularly problematic category for typological categorization as they vary considerably in morphological properties and functionality cross-linguistically, and their morphology and function do not always match. Their diachronic origin from the grammaticalization of “purposive” action nouns is quite a widespread phenomenon, which may explain divergences between languages in their morphosyntax regarding the degree of integration into the verbal system. Like participles, they refer to an argument of the main verb, but unlike participles, they exclude agreement with their subjects: crucially, the syntax of infinitives involves raising and control phenomena.
Indo-Iranian and Greek will be the primary research objects of the project followed by other Indo-European traditions (e.g., Anatolian, Latin, and Tocharian), which, having their own distinctive features, provide a privileged perspective on the main purposes of the research. Moreover, Germanic (Old Norse and Old Icelandic) and Albanian are expected to attest to the possible continuity of forms and/or functions into later periods.