Thesis title: Il presente a raddoppiamento in vedico, avestico e protoindoeuropeo
In Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan - the oldest attested Indo-Iranian languages - we find five verbal stems that employ reduplication, that is, the total or partial repetition of the phonological material constituting a word, typically associated with the expression of specific semantic or grammatical values: a present stem, an aorist stem, the perfect, the desiderative, and the intensive. Among these formations, the reduplicated present has often attracted particular attention among Indo-Europeanists, who over time have advanced various hypotheses concerning both the formal structure of the reduplication and the specific meaning to be ascribed to the corresponding Proto-Indo-European stem. Despite these efforts, no consensus has yet been reached, either on the formal or on the semantic level. The present doctoral dissertation aims to offer, through a systematic analysis of the Rigvedic and Avestan data, a new contribution that may help to resolve the impasse in which Indo-European linguistics currently finds itself. Following a review of the state of the art, two new reconstructions will be presented - the one formal, the other semantic - intended to account for the diversity of the attested data.