The Hittite verbal system diverges significantly in several of the basic categories from the ProtoIndo-European system as reconstructed on the basis of other ancient Indo-European languages (primarily Sanskrit and Ancient Greek). One such difference concerns the system of verbal reduplication, which, although it may be formally and functionally comparable to that attested in other IndoEuropean languages, cannot be derived from the same immediate linguistic ancestor as the latter. As
can be determined by way of relative chronology of sound changes that are relevant to the development of the individual reduplicated forms, as well as through the identification of productive and
non-productive reduplication types and the corresponding type of verbal-stem structure, Hittite
seems to preserve only a small handful of reduplicated verbal stems that can be unambiguously
traced back to Proto-Indo-European. At the same time, it can be shown that much of the remaining
portion of reduplicated stems date to the Proto-Anatolian period or are not older than Hittite itself.
These are ultimately based on the derivational, stem-forming morphology inherited from the protolanguage, but they are clearly formally distinct from the directly inherited core group of reduplicated verbs. One of the most prominent innovations of the Proto-Anatolian system, retained in Hittite
as a productive reduplication type, is the emergence of copy reduplication, while only Hittite exhibits a disyllabic subtype of strong reduplication and allows for initial cluster copying reduplication.
The functional role of reduplication in the Hittite verbal system should not be considered in isolation from the function typical of the Hittite imperfective suffixes, which in fact feature as either
their functional equivalents or appear alongside them – as a synchronically more productive type of
word-formation – to merely reinforce the already present function of reduplication itself. In addition
to a dearth of inherited reduplicated formations attested with already lexicalized meanings, reduplication in Hittite primarily serves iterative and intensive functions. From this it logically follows that
reduplication was inherited into Proto-Anatolian as a stem-forming affix which was part of derivational morphology, more specifically one of the means of modifying the derivational aspect
(Aktionsart) of the verb, and that it is exactly in this role that the system of reduplication continued
to operate productively within the Hittite verbal system.
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