The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in Proto-Indo-European

Accusative, ergative, or semantic alignment

Datos Bibliográficos

ID23213315
AutoresRoland A Pooth (0000-0002-2674-4791, Ghent University, autor de correspondencia), Roland Pooth (Ghent University, St. Pietersnieuwstraat 33, Gent , Belgium), Peter Alexander Kerkhof (Leiden University, Rapenburg 70, EZ Leiden , Netherlands), Leonid Kulikov (Ghent University, St. Pietersnieuwstraat 33, Gent , Belgium), Леонид Куликов (0000-0002-7825-4866, Ghent University), Jóhanna Barðdal (0000-0003-0164-4249, Ghent University, St. Pietersnieuwstraat 33, Gent , Belgium)
Año2019
Volumen124
Número1
Páginas245-264
Fecha de publicación2019-09-18
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaIndogermanische Forschungen (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0019-7262 • E-ISSN: 1613-0405
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/if-2019-0009
OpenAlexW2969231007
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas16

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).

Adjective · Argument (complex analysis) · Ergative case · Genitive case · Hittite language · Linguistics · Nominative case · Noun · Verb · Ancient Near East History · History · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Mathematics · Philosophy