The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in Proto-Indo-European : Accusative, ergative, or semantic alignment

Pooth, Roland;Kerkhof, Peter Alexander;Kulikov, Leonid;Barđdal, Jóhanna
(2019) Indogermanische Forschungen :Zeitschrift für Indogermanistik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft — Vol. 124, n° 1, p. 245-264 (2019)

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Authors
  • Pooth, Roland
    Author
  • Kerkhof, Peter Alexander
    Author
  • Kulikov, LeonidUCLouvain
    Author
  • Barđdal, Jóhanna
    Author
Abstract
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).
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Pooth, R., Kerkhof, P. A., Kulikov, L., & Barđdal, J. (2019). The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in Proto-Indo-European : Accusative, ergative, or semantic alignment. Indogermanische Forschungen :Zeitschrift für Indogermanistik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, 124(1), 245-264. https://doi.org/10.1515/if-2019-0009 (Original work published 2019)