Compounding and underlying syntax in Hittite between Indo-European heritage and language contact

The paper gives a critical overview of the types of compounds and of other competing constructions in Hittite and only marginally in some other Anatolian languages of the II millennium. The aim is to identify the Anatolian material that allows on the one side to recognize the basis of compounding for the IndoEuropean (IE) Anatolian branch and for the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word formation, and, on the other, to understand which may have been the influences of other non-Indo-European languages on these constructions in Hittite. Accepting a broad definition of the category of ‘compound’1 and the corresponding compositional word formation strategies, we proposed in another work (see Cotticelli-Kurras, in press) a representation and typologization of the Hittite compounds, and their classification according to their structure, the classes of their constituents, and finally their semantics. In this work, recalling the different types of compounds, I will discuss some parameters like productivity, transparency, relative chronology, some lexical patterns within a genre of the different compounds in Hittite, in order to highlight especially two further aspects. On the one hand, I will consider those structures, which have a similar function as the compounds, but formally display a sort of prototypical previous stage of a compound structure, on the other, the overall influence of similar structures (compounds, phrases and univerbations) from the surrounding languages through language contact on the Hittite lexicon. We include in the former ones those types of competing structures, which are hypostases, attributive relative sentences, nominal sentences as appositional 1 It could be near to Brugmann’s definition (Brugmann 1906: 3): “Verschmilzt ein syntaktischer Wortcomplex zu einer Worteinheit, so nennt man diese ein Compositum”. Cf. Brugmann 1905–1906b. 62 Paola Cotticelli-Kurras Compounds Subordinate Coordinate Appositive Exocentric Synthetic structures, and additionally some contact-induced structures, like calque and hybrids formations. Finally, we will try to give an overview of a chronological development of all these structures in the Hittite tradition. In the belief that compounds in Hittite are an inherited Indo-European morphological structure, we try to suggest a possible contact-induced spread of these constructions influenced through similar structures from the neighbor languages