“Back to the Root” constitutes the proceedings of the 15th Fachtagung of the Indogermanische Gesellschaft, held in Vienna 13-16 September 2016.
Despite the prominence of the general concept of the root in the reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language (and in linguistic theory), the properties of Indo-European roots have so far received comparatively little in the way of detailed investigation. The 23 peer-reviewed papers by 27 scholars in this volume present a first step in this direction, and they constitute a quite diverse, but nevertheless always motto-related collection of papers.
One paper takes a critical look at the concept of the root itself (Götz Keydana), another focuses on a formal constraint on the PIE root (Ignasi-Xavier Adiego), and two discuss certain structural subclasses of PIE roots (H. Craig Melchert, Thomas Steer).
Four papers mainly deal with formally marked classes of roots in single branches (Bettina Bock/Sabine Ziegler, Ronald Kim, Georges-Jean Pinault, Oliver Plötz). Two contributions have a special focus on roots and verbal morphology (Davide Bertocci, Miguel Villanueva Svensson).
Three papers deal with various aspects of adjectival roots (Stefan Höfler, Rosemarie Lühr, Alan J. Nussbaum); five contributions take a closer look at specific roots (Máté Ittzés, Jay H. Jasanoff, Elisabeth Rieken/Ilya Yakubovich, Nicholas Zair, Marina Zorman), and two further papers are about suppletive root patterns (Kristina Becker/Theresa Roth, José Luis García Ramón). Finally, the papers by Norbert Oettinger and Guglielmo Inglese/Silvia Luraghi

Hannes A. Fellner

studied historical and theoretical linguistics at the University of Vienna and received his PhD from Harvard University in 2013. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna from 2013-2017 and Assistant Professor at Leiden University from 2017-2018. Since 2018 he is the principal investigator of a START-project funded by Austrian Science Fund dedicated to the research of the Central Asian variants of the Indian Brahmi script. Since 2021 he is Associate Professor for historical linguistics and digital philology at the Department of Linguistics and the Department of European and Comparative Literature and Language Studies at the University of Vienna. He is co-editor of the journals "Die Sprache" (Harrassowitz) and "Tocharian and Indo-European Studies" (Museum Tusculanum). He is a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include Indo-European nominal morphology, historical and comparative linguistics and philology of the Indo-European languages of the ancient Silk Road, and theoretical approaches to language change.