Nasal presents and weak causativity: evidence from Sanskrit and Latin

The paper deals with some semantic properties that have been acknowledged for nasal presents in most Indo-European languages. Moving from the hypothesis that the nasal morphology might assign to the verbal stem a causative meaning, I have analysed Old Indian data, in order to show that: i) as typological studies indicate, there are at least two kinds of causative transformations, one transitivizing an originally inchoative process, and one that applies onto transitive verbs; ii) nasal morphology seems to belong basically to the first kind, as it usually goes on a pair with intransitive presents. Vedic and Sanskrit display a rich inventory of nasal presents, that, despite their morhological variation, seem to belong, at least typically, to change- and move- verbs, and to locatum- and location verbs, which seems confirmed from the highly significant correspondencies to Latin data. Given this, the paper argues for a new etymology of the nasal morphemes, that are related with the IE *-no suffix forming past participles and verbal adjectives; the origin of the nasal type would be to explain not in a bare morphological view, but as a morphosyntactic process, in which nasal presents may be thought as the output of a de-adjectival derivation, taking place within the vP of the sentence structure