Revisiting Hittite prayer lexicon: a focus on heteroclitic nouns and light verb constructions

Abstract This paper focuses on the Hittite prayer lexicon, with particular regard to deverbal forms derived with the suffixes -( a̅ ) tar , - eššar , and - war (- mar ) from different verbs (i.e., arkuwai - ‘plead, argue’, mald - ‘declaim, recite’, mugai - ‘invoke’, talliya - ‘summon’, walliya - ‘praise’, wek - ‘wish, ask’). The aim of this work is to analyse the semantics of the verbal nouns for ‘prayer’ to identify possible semantic distinctions among these forms. In addition, the light verb constructions of these verbal nouns, with the verb iya - ‘do, make’ and its iterative form ešša -, are examined, comparing them with the corresponding synthetic forms, to detect similarities and differences in the use of these verbal constructions.