The origin of the oblique-subject construction: An Indo-European comparison

Barðdal, Jóhanna; Eythórsson, Thórhallur

doi:10.1075/cilt.305.19bar

Cited by 53 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…On the other hand, certain scholars argue that non-canonically marked arguments in experiencer constructions are in fact objects, or at least derived from object arguments (cf. Cole et al, 1980;Faarlund, 2001; Barpdal and Eythó rsson, 2009 for discussion). Recent typological linguistics is generally inclined to consider ''subject'' as a language-specific category (cf.…”

Section: Evidence For Oblique Subjects In Old Indo-aryan?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Oblique case-marking in Indo-Aryan experiencer constructions: Historical roots and synchronic variation

Verbeke

Куликов

Willems

2015

Lingua

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Section: Evidence For Oblique Subjects In Old Indo-aryan?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Oblique case-marking in Indo-Aryan experiencer constructions: Historical roots and synchronic variation

Verbeke

Куликов

Willems

2015

Lingua

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“…Thus even if both tenses were taken into account (it is not clear how tense-based splits are coded in the data), Kurmanji would, despite its ergative alignment, wind up looking much like English or Korean. By the same token, Icelandic would cluster among the ergative languages on the plot, despite the fact that much of its syntax exhibits nominative/accusative alignment, with no trace of ergativity (see Barðdal and Eythórsson (2009) on alignment in Icelandic, and Haig (2009) for a somewhat different view). Nichols' approach, with its focus on a notoriously 'messy' set of verbs, should thus be seen as complementary to much traditional work on alignment, which focuses on the morphosyntax associated with 'prototypical transitive' events (kill, carry, cut etc.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Review of Donohue & Wichmann (2008): The typology of semantic alignment

Haig

2010

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Donohue, Mark & Søren Wichmann (eds.). 2008. The typology of semantic alignment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xvi+465 pp. (ISBN 978 0 19 923838 5) Reviewed by Geoffrey Haig (University of Kiel)The book under review focuses on languages in which intransitive subjects are not treated uniformly in terms of their case and agreement configurations. Traditionally, such systems have been discussed under labels such as 'active/stative' , 'split-S' , 'fluid-S' , or 'split intransitivity' . However, the editors introduce the term 'semantic alignment' , and the scope of the book is actually much broader than would be implied by any of the traditional labels. The sheer breadth of data covered in the book renders detailed treatment of all contributions impossible; readers are referred to the excellent summaries of the individual chapters provided in Wichmann's overview contribution, which I will not duplicate here. Instead, I will focus on the chapters of more general interest, and relate the main points to the other contributions wherever possible.The volume consists of a well-balanced collection of papers on a typologically rich sample of languages, rounded off by a common reference section, and indices for subjects, authors, and languages. There are four parts to the book: an introductory section containing four contributions on theoretical and general typological issues (Part I), followed by case studies of individual languages and language groups, arranged geographically: Eurasia (Part II), The Pacific (Part III), and the Americas (Part IV). Søren Wichmann's contribution 'The study of semantic alignment: retrospect and state of the art' introduces the new terminology ('semantic alignment'), grounds the book in its research context, and summarizes the individual chapters. Wichmann briefly traces the two major strands in the history of research on active/stative alignment: First, the holistic typologies with their Humboldtian roots and their refinement through Sapir and the later more axiomatic formulation of Klimov and associates. Second, a more contingent view, according to which alignments are construction-specific and, in principle, independent of other parts of the grammar. While the strong version of the Klimovian holistic approach to active/stative alignment is largely debunked (6), Wichmann notes certain pervasive similarities across languages with this alignment, so a wholesale abandonment of the search for correlates of active/stative alignment is probably premature. This chapter blends clarity and brevity, providing a fine overview of a very complex set of issues.

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“…In other words, our preliminary results, based on five branches of Indo-European, certainly suggest that the Dative Subject Construction is inherited in these branches, as opposed to being borrowed or having arisen independently in the different daughters (cf. Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, 2012b, Barðdal 2012, Barðdal & Smitherman 2012. This inherited Dative Subject Construction has certain semantic properties, which are in principle reconstructable as a semantic space, meaning that even though we are not reconstructing any individual verbs and their lexical semantic meaning, it is still possible to reconstruct the meaning of more abstract argument structure constructions for earlier language stages and dead languages, given the tools of Cognitive Construction Grammar in combination with the Semantic Map Model.…”

Section: A Reconstruction Of the Semantics Of The Dative Subject Consmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconstructing constructional semantics

Barðdal

Smitherman

Bjarnadóttir³

et al. 2012

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Abstract:As the historical linguistic community is well aware, reconstructing semantics is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Such reconstruction has so far mostly been carried out on lexical items, like words and morphemes, and has not been conducted for larger and more complex linguistic units, which intuitively seems to be a more intricate task, especially given the lack of methodological criteria and guidelines within the field. This follows directly from the fact that most current theoretical frameworks are not construction based, that is, they do not assume that constructions are form-meaning correspondences. In order to meet this challenge, we present an attempt at reconstructing constructional semantics, more precisely the semantics of the Dative Subject Construction for an earlier stage of Indo-European. For this purpose we employ lexical semantic verb classes in combination with the semantic map model (Barðdal 2007, Barðdal, Kristoffersen & Sveen 2011, showing how incredibly stable semantic fields may remain across long time spans, and how reconstructing such semantic fields may be accomplished.

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The origin of the oblique-subject construction: An Indo-European comparison

Cited by 53 publications

References 16 publications

Oblique case-marking in Indo-Aryan experiencer constructions: Historical roots and synchronic variation

Oblique case-marking in Indo-Aryan experiencer constructions: Historical roots and synchronic variation

Review of Donohue & Wichmann (2008): The typology of semantic alignment

Reconstructing constructional semantics

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