The development of local particles and adverbs in Anatolian as a grammaticalization process

The paper aims at giving a unified account of the origins and development of the Anatolian ‘local particles’, which, as such, are not attested in any other Indo-European language. The particles are P2 clitics and mostly co-occur with some type of local expression. The function of the Indo-European preverbs is taken by a set of adverbs which, in the earliest stages of Anatolian, display a number of features typical of nominal constituents, as in the expression attas=mas appan, ‘after my father’, where the adverb appan takes a modifier in the genitive. The adverbs often co-occur with the particles. Etymologically, both the adverbs and the particles can in part be connected with the Indo-European preverbs. Since postpositional and preverbal syntax for the adverbs appears to develop during the history of Hittite, it has been suggested that Anatolian is particularly archaic, because it mirros a stage of Indo-European at which there where no adpositions and no preverbs, but only independent adverbs. I argue that the particles go back to adverbial elements, and where formerly the functional equivalent of the Indo-European preverbs/adpositions. Later, these forms underwent semantic bleaching, became clitic and were attracted toward P2. (It must be mentioned that Anatolian is particularly rich in P2 clitics, which also include sentence particles, modal particles, and various types of pronominal forms). After cliticization of the former preverbs, the class of preverbs/adposition was reconstructed through the creation of local adverbs, which, in their turn, partly derive from nominal forms, partly from Indo-European adverbs. My claim has two consequences: a) it shows that the alleged archaism of Anatolian, at least as far as the existence of preverbs/adpositions is concerned, is an illusion; this word class did exist before Anatolian split from the rest of Indo-European already, but it was lost and renewed: what we observe in Old Hittite is the beginning of this renewal; b) it provides an example of a grammaticalization chain shift: former preverbs have undergone semantic bleaching and phonological reduction, becoming particles, and new preverbs have been created out of former adverbs and nouns to replace the older ones.