From -<i>jan </i>to <i>sik</i>: the valency-changing mechanism
This article suggests a chain of valence-changing tools in Gothic. The shift from the Indo-European to Proto-Germanic verbal system led to the emergence of a new mechanism of creating new verbs that we know as - jan and - nan verbs (weak classes 1 and 4). Both classes, while originally able to produce new denominal and deverbative verbs, seem to have started to be less productive by the time of the Gothic Bible, limiting themselves to denominal formations. Those formations allowed, among other things, the creation of simple pairs like fulljan ‘to fill’ - fullnan ‘to become full’, creating an equipollent system of freely-formed denominal verbs. The Gothic verbal system on the whole, however, became heavily skewed towards easily-discernible causative formations because of the vast number of verbs that could be easily formed from adjectives in most contexts that required them. Because the -nan class could not form decausatives from - jan verbs (the classes arose in parallel to each other, and the deverbative formation path was closed for both), a new mechanism was required to regain both the symmetry and easy formation. This mechanism was the reflexive pronoun sik . The article looks at the statistics of combinations of sik with - jan verbs, as well as other verbs, and discusses how voice may have played a role in the overall shift from - jan to sik as the main valency-changing mechanism.