UCLA

The heteroclitic nominals of Indo-European retain one of the oldest types of inflection in the family, one with suffix-final -r- in certain cases and -n- in others. This alternation finds no parallel elsewhere in Indo-European morphology and has been considered one of the characteristic traits of an archaic Indo-European language. This dissertation examines a subcategory of these nominals, the *-wr̥-/-w(e/o)n-heteroclites in the Sanskrit language with comparative phonological, morphological, and mythopoetic evidence from the other Indo-European languages. This study finds that numerous *-wr̥-/-w(e/o)n heteroclites has gone unnoticed because of the obscuring effects of the metathesis rule *wr̥ > *ru. The resulting Sanskrit -ru- and -lu- nominals could be built either to verbal roots or to *-�h₂-abstracts and frequently functioned as animate adjectives. The discovery of these -ru- and -lu- adjectives provides new insight into the morphophonological system of Indo-European and demonstrates the predictive power of the compositional method, which models Indo-European morphology with discrete, accentually tagged morphemes, over the older Erlangen model, which applies abstract templates or vowel melodies over strings of morphemes. These heteroclitic adjectives also represent a morphological innovation within the Indo-European family that does not appear in the earliest attested branch of the family, Anatolian. A large class of *-wr̥-/-w(e/o)n-heteroclitic nominals attaches to inherited *- �h-abstracts—a pattern examined in Sanskrit and throughout the other Indo-European languages. These *-�h₂-wr̥-/-w(o)n-constructions are shown to be an archaic feature of the family with reflexes throughout the nominal and verbal systems of various daughter branches including Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, Ancient Greek, Latin, and Tocharian.