Dative subjects in Gothic
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Giacomo Bucci
Abstract
This article is devoted to the study of potential dative subjects in Gothic, the earliest attested Germanic language, focusing in particular on word-order distribution in the Gothic Bible, the Skeireins, and the Bologna Fragment. This entails a comparison between affirmative clauses, negated clauses, and interrogative clauses, contrasting nominative subjects with potential dative subjects across both translated and native Gothic passages. We expand Ebel’s (1978) methodology to the Bologna Fragment in order to confirm which syntactic structures are native to Gothic. A comparison of the word order found with nominative subjects and potential dative subjects in native Gothic passages reveals that potential dative subjects pattern unambiguously with nominative subjects in several respects. Earlier research has documented that potential non-nominative subjects in Gothic pass the control infinitive test (Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012). Here we adduce further evidence for their subject status based on word order and a hitherto undocumented example of long-distance reflexivization.
© 2024 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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- On the etymology of Tocharian A śemäl ‘domestic animal’
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Contents
- Rhotic metathesis in Gandhari
- The fronting of back vowels after *j in Slavonic
- On the etymology of Tocharian A śemäl ‘domestic animal’
- ‘A man of full-sin’
- Dative subjects in Gothic
- From oath to prohibition
- Khotanese ph‑ < Iranian *θu̯‑
- Evidence for a new pre-Proto-Indo-European sound law *-ē̆m > PIE *-ō̆m
- Celtic in Greek characters and implications for Greek and Celtic phonology
- On some cognates of Avestan hakat̰
- The life cycles of counterfactual mood in early Indo-European languages
- A missed regular sound change between Latin and French
- To compound or not to compound?
