Johanna Barddal

The change that never happened: the story of oblique subjects

This paper contributes to an ongoing debate on the syntactic status of oblique subject-like NPs in the ‘impersonal’ construction (of the type me-thinks) in Old Germanic. The debate is caused by the lack of canonical subject case marking in such NPs. It has been argued that these NPs are syntactic objects, but we provide evidence for their subject status, as in Modern Icelandic and Faroese. Thus, we argue that the syntactic status of the oblique subject-like NPs has not changed at all from object status to subject status, contra standard claims in the literature. Our evidence stems from Old Icelandic, but the analysis has implications for the other old Germanic languages as well. However, a change from non-canonical to canonical subject case marking (‘Nominative Sickness’) has affected all the Germanic languages to a varying degree. (Less)

Between the historical languages and the reconstructed language : an alternative approach to the Gerundive + “Dative of Agent” construction in Indo-European

Abstract The “dative of agent” construction in the Indo-European languages is most likely inherited from Proto-Indo-European (Hettrich 1990). Two recent proposals (Danesi 2013; Luraghi 2016), however, claim that the construction contains no agent at all. Luraghi argues that it is a secondary development from an original beneficiary function, while Danesi maintains that the construction is indeed reconstructable. Following Danesi, we analyze the relevant data in six different Indo-European languages: Sanskrit, Avestan, Ancient Greek, Latin, Tocharian, and Lithuanian, revealing similarities at a morphosyntactic level, a semantic level, and to some extent at an etymological level. An analysis involving a modal reading of the predicate, with a dative subject and a nominative object, is better equipped to account for the particulars of the construction than the traditional agentive/passive analysis. The proposal is couched within Construction Grammar, where the basic unit of language is the construction, i. e. a form-function correspondence. As constructions are by definition units of comparanda, they can be successfully utilized in the reconstruction of a proto-construction for Proto-Indo-European.