Roots and Word Classes between Indo-European Reconstruction and Greek Historical Evidence: Some Insights from Nominal Composition

The process of nominal composition is very widespread in ancient Indo-European languages, which often show an extremely high degree of morphological complexity. By taking into account some peculiarities about the relationship between agent nouns, action nouns and compounding in Ancient Greek, this paper argues that the morphological process of nominal composition closely reflects the ongoing evolution of the system of word classes in this language from an archaic phase, where the boundaries between classes were more blurred, to one that is characterised by a more clear-cut differentiation within the lexicon.