La categoria dell’aggettivo in ittito e il mutamento del sistema delle parti del discorso nella famiglia indoeuropea

In some recent works, a partly new functional-typological definition of parts of speech (PoS) based on Croft’s PoS theory has been proposed and applied to three ancient IE languages, namely RV Sanskrit, Homeric Greek and Latin. The results were promising. While the NOUN and the VERB constructions are similar in each language bar minor differences, the most typical ADJECTIVE construction turned out to be a simple adjective stem in Latin, but a derived stem built on a verbal root in RV Sanskrit (that is, a participle or a different deverbal adjective), Homeric Greek being intermediate between the two extremes. This being so, a previously neglected typological change has been claimed to have come about in the Indo-European family, namely the change from a language “without adjectives” to a language “with true adjectives”. The present paper aims to evaluate the claim in the light of Hittite data.