1. The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in Proto-Indo-European
- Author
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Peter Alexander Kerkhof, Roland Pooth, Jóhanna Barđdal, Leonid Kulikov, and UCL - SSH/INCA - Institut des civilisations, arts et lettres
- Subjects
Proto-Indo-European ,converse lability ,050101 languages & linguistics ,Linguistics and Language ,History ,Dative case ,ergativity ,GREEK ,Languages and Literatures ,Language and Linguistics ,non-nominative subjects ,030507 speech-language pathology & audiology ,03 medical and health sciences ,Hittite language ,Subject (grammar) ,Historical linguistics ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Argument (linguistics) ,alignment systems ,argument structure ,morphophonology ,05 social sciences ,Nominative case ,language.human_language ,Linguistics ,Ancient language ,Ergative case ,language ,0305 other medical science - Abstract
For a long time one of the most bewildering conundrums of Indo- European linguistics has been the issue of how to reconstruct the alignment system of this ancient language state, given the lack of distinction between s and o marking in the Proto-Indo-European neuter nouns and the problem of the Hittite ergative. An additional complication stems from the existence of argument structure constructions where the subject(-like) argument is marked in a different case than the nominative, like the accusative or the dative. Our aim with the present article is to fill two needs with one deed and offer a unified account of this century-long bone of contention. In contribution to the ongoing discussion in the field, we claim that a semantic alignment system, in the terms of Donohue & Wichmann (2008), might not only fit better with the morphological data that are currently reconstructed for the ancestral language, but also with the existence of non-canonically case-marked subjects in general (Barðdal, Bjarnadóttir, et al. 2013; Danesi, Johnson & Barðdal 2017).
- Published
- 2019
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