Proto-Indo-European support verbs and support-verb constructions

This chapter argues that even if typological considerations make it very likely that
the category of support-verb constructions did in fact exist in Proto-Indo-European
and the support-verb use of roots such as *dheh1 ‘to put’ or *deh3 ‘to give’ may be
assumed for the parent language with a sufficient degree of certainty, the
reconstruction of specific support-verb constructions will probably never be entirely
successful. Apart from the almost complete lack of comparable constructions built of
cognate elements in the individual daughter languages it also runs counter to
various theoretical and methodological principles of comparative historical linguistics.