Maybe you find this thread, and Hemo's response in particular, interesting...
Thanks, Bitmap. I was hoping to have Rusty's input on this topic, and thanks to you, I have had it.
I wonder if it could also be that getting bigger is by definition something not stative.
I was giving this consideration over the weekend. I think that such a verb, which I choose to call an "automatic" verb (since it describes an action which effects only the actor, and is caused by the very nature of the actor itself), is indeed not stative, since it describes an (albeit "automatic") action. The action of the verb, being "automatic", effects only the actor and does not effect any direct object, and so the verb is intransitive, but the verb does not describe a status or state of being, and so is not stative.
What I wonder is if all second-conjugation verbs were originally stative, with only some of them shifting away from that meaning with time.
I have come to think not, Pax. I did some digging into this, and think that I have the answer, which appears to lie in the historically shifting nature of the Indo-European causative verbal suffix as it descended into the Italic languages, and in the differentiation within Latin between causative verbs produced within Latin and those inherited directly from Proto-Italic. Apparently in Proto-Italic,
-eō, in addition to being the suffix of stative verbs, was considered to be the suffix of those causative verbs which had been formed within PIE from primary or root verbs. In other words: in Proto-Italic,
-eō was both the stative and the causative verbal suffix. I do not know if
-eō was productive in forming causative verbs within Proto-Italic, or if it was only the Proto-Italic rendering of the old PIE causative verbal suffix. Whichever of these was the case, however, as a stative Proto-Italic suffix,
-eō was derived from the IE stative suffix
*-éh₁yeti, and as a causative Proto-Italic suffix,
-eō was derived from the IE causative suffix
*-éyeti (or
-éye-ti). These two PIE suffixes would have been more easily differentiated by the early Indo-European ear than they are by us today, since the laryngeal sounds, which were, to say the least, very important to early Indo-European speech, would have made utterly clear the difference. In Proto-Italic, the stative and causative verbal suffixes seem to have been undifferentiated. It is easy to see how
*-éh₁yeti and
*-éyeti could both yield
-eō in Proto-Italic, wherein PIE laryngeals were largely dispensed with. Certainly, laryngeals, and indeed breath sounds in general, seem (when in excess of the necessary minimum) to have always sounded harsh, strange or unnecessary to the Italian ear. The problem with eliminating the IE laryngeal sounds in Proto-Italic, though, is that certain productive morphemes became both orthographically and phonetically undifferentiated from other morphemes from which they were differentiated within PIE by the laryngeal sounds, and such seems to have been the case with stative
-eō and causative
-eō in Ptoto-Italic. By the Classical period, and almost certainly by the time of such "late" Old Latin writers as Plautus or Cato, the two suffixes seem (for reasons that I do not know) to have differentiated once again into stative
-eō and causative
-iō (perhaps reanalyzed from the PIE
-yeti/(é)-yeti or perhaps it had been in Proto-Italic all along alongside
-eō), which is how we know them today, and the old causative "
-eō" from Proto-Italic was, at that time, no longer productive (again, it may or may not have been productive within Proto-Italic itself). Italic verbs, though, had fallen firmly into inflective patterns (conjugations) in the Proto-Italic period; Old Latin and Classical Latin then inherited those inflective patterns directly, such that both stative Latin verbs, as well as those causative Latin verbs which were not produced within Latin itself but were, rather, inherited as causative verbs from Proto-Italic, were all rendered as second conjugation verbs in
-eō. Only those causative verbs produced within Latin itself were of the first conjugation in
-iō. Put another way, there was no retroactive altering of those causative verbs inherited into Latin from Proto-Italic to make them conform to the Latin causative suffixation in
-iō. Rather,
-iō was just used productively within Latin to form causative verbs, mainly from adjectives (note that this was somewhat in opposition to the old IE
*-éyeti, which was used to form causative verbs from root verbs).
Changing a productive morpheme in order to differentiate it is one thing...changing the inflective pattern of an entire class of verbs retroactively is another matter entirely. So, Latin
augeō is directly descended as a causative verb from Proto-Italic,
*augeō. The reason for the -
eō suffix in Proto-Italic in this case is from the causative sense, which was yeilded from the PIE verb
*h₂owg-éye-ti "to enlarge, to cause to increase", a transitive, causative verb derived from the essentially intransitive primary/root verb
*h₂ewg-. "to grow", "to become larger", "to increase", which essentially represents another of what I have called above "automatic" verbs (note that said
*h₂owg-éye-ti is not a stative IE verb in
*-éh₁yeti). Proto-Italic
*augeō , which had identical meanings as IE
*h₂owg-éye-ti, was then inherited by Latin in unchanged form, as seems to have been the case with all second conjugation causative Latin verbs. In fact, the stems of all Latin second conjugation verbs do indeed include the "
e" phoneme of the old Proto-Italic causative/stative
-eō, since they are ultimately derived either from PIE causatives in
*-éyeti, or statives in
*-éh₁yeti, and since these conjugations were inherited directly into early Latin from Proto-Italic in their unaltered entirety.
I had better stop now. There is smoke coming out of my ears, and a distinct burning smell...
