Position as a behavioral property of subjects
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Esther Le Mair
Abstract
A subject analysis of oblique subject-like arguments remains controversial even across modern languages where the available data are not finite: while such arguments are considered syntactic subjects in Icelandic, they have more often been analyzed as objects in Lithuanian, for example. This issue has been left relatively neglected for the ancient Indo-European languages outside of Sanskrit (Hock 1990), Gothic (Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012), and Ancient Greek (Danesi 2015). In this article, we address the status of oblique subject-like arguments in Old Irish, whose strict word-order enables us to compare the position (relative to the verb and other arguments) of nominative subject arguments of the canonical type to oblique subject-like arguments. We first establish a baseline for neutral word-order of nominative subjects and accusative objects and then compare their distribution to that of oblique subject-like arguments under two conditions: i) on a subject analysis and ii) on an object analysis. The word-order distribution differs significantly across the two contexts when the oblique arguments are analyzed as syntactic objects, but not when they are analyzed as syntactic subjects. These findings add to the growing evidence that oblique subject-like arguments should be analyzed as syntactic subjects, although their coding properties are non-canonical.
© 2017 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Some remarks on dicens in Late Latin texts
- A shared substrate between Greek and Italic
- The paradigm of the word for ‘house, home’ in Old Irish and related issues
- Towards the prosodic structure of infinitive formations in Baltic and Slavic and its diachronic implications
- The development of the Proto-Indo-European instrumental suffix in Germanic
- Position as a behavioral property of subjects
- Between the historical languages and the reconstructed language
- Vocalic elements and prosody in Slavic comparatives
- Luwic *mar-
- Sidetic masara ↑ue[
- Armenian hołm ‘wind’, Greek πόλεμος ‘war’
- Schimpfen und Fluchen im Luwischen
- Das Suffix *-u̯ó- im Indogermanischen und Anatolischen
- An agreement between the Sardians and the Mermnads in the Lydian language?
- The Old Hittite and the Proto-Indo-European tense-aspect system
- Die Pronominal‑ und Partikelkette in den altanatolischen Sprachen
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Some remarks on dicens in Late Latin texts
- A shared substrate between Greek and Italic
- The paradigm of the word for ‘house, home’ in Old Irish and related issues
- Towards the prosodic structure of infinitive formations in Baltic and Slavic and its diachronic implications
- The development of the Proto-Indo-European instrumental suffix in Germanic
- Position as a behavioral property of subjects
- Between the historical languages and the reconstructed language
- Vocalic elements and prosody in Slavic comparatives
- Luwic *mar-
- Sidetic masara ↑ue[
- Armenian hołm ‘wind’, Greek πόλεμος ‘war’
- Schimpfen und Fluchen im Luwischen
- Das Suffix *-u̯ó- im Indogermanischen und Anatolischen
- An agreement between the Sardians and the Mermnads in the Lydian language?
- The Old Hittite and the Proto-Indo-European tense-aspect system
- Die Pronominal‑ und Partikelkette in den altanatolischen Sprachen
