The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in Proto-Indo-European
-
Roland Pooth
,
Peter Alexander Kerkhof
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).
© 2019 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt
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- Some difficult Tocharian genitives
- Kleines Lautgesetz, große Wirkung
- Germanic *ƀra (PIE *pro) as ditropic clitic and the etymology of *ƀrenga-, *ƀrūka- and *ƀraiđ̯a-
- Definite referential null objects in Old Hittite
- An apple a day …
- Phonotactics of the Lycian labial glide clusters
- Indo-European cladistic nomenclature
- The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in Proto-Indo-European
- TB pitke ‘fat, grease, oil’ and PIE *peih̯1- ‘to be fat, be bursting with’
- Indo-European syntax in disguise
- On Indo-European superlative suffixes
- Old Irish aue ‘descendant’ and its descendants
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Dating Sanskrit texts using linguistic features and neural networks
- Some difficult Tocharian genitives
- Kleines Lautgesetz, große Wirkung
- Germanic *ƀra (PIE *pro) as ditropic clitic and the etymology of *ƀrenga-, *ƀrūka- and *ƀraiđ̯a-
- Definite referential null objects in Old Hittite
- An apple a day …
- Phonotactics of the Lycian labial glide clusters
- Indo-European cladistic nomenclature
- The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in Proto-Indo-European
- TB pitke ‘fat, grease, oil’ and PIE *peih̯1- ‘to be fat, be bursting with’
- Indo-European syntax in disguise
- On Indo-European superlative suffixes
- Old Irish aue ‘descendant’ and its descendants
