Reconstructing Syntax

Abstract

During several decades, syntactic reconstruction has been more or less regarded as a bootless and an unsuccessful venture, not least due to the heavy criticism in the 1970s from scholars like Watkins, Jeffers, Lightfoot, etc. This fallacious view culminated in Lightfoot's (2002: 625) conclusion: "[i]f somebody thinks that they can reconstruct grammars more successfully and in more widespread fashion, let them tell us their methods and show us their results. Then we'll eat the pudding." This volume provides methods for the identification of i) cognates in syntax, and ii) the directionality of syntactic change, showcasing the results in the introduction and eight articles. These examples are offered as both tastier and also more nourishing than the pudding Lightfoot had in mind when discarding the viability of reconstructing syntax.

From grammaticalization to Diachronic Construction Grammar

“…Fourth, by recognizing the relevance of the larger construction as the critical "cognate" unit and by distinguishing the distinctive synchronic outcomes characteristic of different mechanisms of change, DCxG makes it possible to increase the rigor of syntactic reconstruction, even in languages with little depth of attested history (cf. Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012a and the contributions to Barðdal et al 2020). This, in turn, can increase the confidence with which we assert cognacy between lexical sources and grammatical morphology and identify pathways of evolution between them.…”

Non-nominative subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek

“…Together with the Latin and Ancient Greek evidence presented in this article, which overwhelmingly speaks for a subject analysis of potential non-nominative subjects in these early Indo-European languages, there are certainly solid grounds for assuming that not only the argument structure found with verbs selecting for non-nominative subjects may be reconstructed for a common proto-stage (cf. Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012a;Barðdal & Smitherman 2013;Barðdal, Bjarnadóttir, et al 2013;Barðdal 2015;Barðdal & Eythórsson 2020;Barðdal, Kulikov, et al 2020;Danesi, Johnson & Barðdal 2017;Dunn et al 2017;Johnson et al 2019;Pooth et al 2019;Frotscher, Kroonen & Barðdal 2022), but also the behavioral properties of non-nominative subjects. In other words, a subject analysis has now been independently corroborated for the early languages of three different Indo-European branches, first for Germanic during the last decade or so, but now also for Latin and Ancient Greek.…”

Onpersoonlijke datief-nominatiefwerkwoorden in het hedendaagse Duits: definitie, inventaris en semantische classificatie

“…De idee achter deze werkwijze is dat men van semantisch gelijkaardige werkwoorden mag verwachten dat ze ook een gelijkaardig casusframe aannemen (cf. Barðdal 2004: 114, Barðdal 1999a, Barðdal 1999b, Barðdal & Eyþórsson 2020. Als input voor deze zoekopdracht dienden alle 56 werkwoorden uit Barðdals oorspronkelijke lijst, dus ook diegene die een subjectachtige accusatief selecteren (cf.…”