Syntactic Reconstruction in Indo-European: State of the Art (original) (raw)

Reconstructing Syntactic Variation in Proto-Indo-European (2014)

Indo-European Linguistics, 2014

This paper discusses the problem of linguistic reconstruction in the Indo-European languages with particular attention to syntax. While many scholars consider syntactic reconstruction as being in principle impossible, other scholars simply apply to syntax the same tenets of the Comparative Method and of Internal Reconstruction, which were originally used in Indo-European studies for reconstructing phonology and morphology. Accordingly, it is assumed that synchronically anomalous syntactic structures are more ancient than productive syntactic constructions; the former are considered as being residues of an early stage of Proto-Indo-European, where they were also more regular and took part in a consistent syntactic system. Various hypotheses of Proto-Indo-European as a syntactically consistent language, which in the last years have witnessed resurgence, are here discussed and criticized. We argue that syntactic consistency is nowhere attested in the Indo-European languages, which in their earliest records rather document an amazing structural variation. Accordingly, we recon

The Curious Case of Reconstruction in Syntax

The curious case of reconstruction in syntax, 2020

The general consensus in the historical linguistics community for the last half a century or so has been that syntactic reconstruction is a bootless and unsuccessful venture. However, this view has slowly but steadily been changing among historical linguists, typologists, and anthropological linguists alike. More and more syntactic reconstructions are being published by respectable and virtuous publication venues. The debate on the viability of syntactic reconstruction, however, continues, and issues like i) lack of cognates, ii) lack of arbitrariness in syntax, iii) lack of directionality in syntactic change, iv) lack of continuous transmission from one generation to the next, and v) lack of form-meaning correspondences have, drop by drop, been argued not to be problematic for syntactic reconstruction. The present volume contributes to two of these issues in detail; first the issue of reliably identifying cognates in syntax and second , the issue of directionality in syntactic change. A systematic program is suggested for identifying cognates in syntax, which by definition is a different enterprise from identifying cognates in phonology or morphology. Examples are given from several different language families: Indo-European, Semitic, Austronesian, Jê, Cariban, and Chibchan. Regarding the issue of directionality for syntactic reconstruction, most of the studies in this volume also demonstrate how local directionality may be identified with the aid of different types of morphosyntactic flags, particularly showcased with examples from Chibchan, Semitic, and various Indo-European languages.

Revising a syntactic isogloss: nominal modifiers marking in Indo-European languages

Variation, Contact and Reconstruction in the Ancient Indo-European Languages: Between Linguistics and Philology, 2022

The paper deals with a morpho-syntactic innovation shared by a group of IE languages: the grammaticalisation of the pronominal linkers in verbless relative NPs as markers of nominal dependency. Three goals are pursued: 1) defining a parametrised framework for a unified description of the highly variable outcomes that this pattern has produced in the historically attested languages (for the first time all collected together); 2) critically revising the existing partial assessments of this isogloss (starting from Benveniste 1966), in order to exclude some languages whose data are too scarce or inconsistent (e.g. Hittite, Latin), and to reassess some other data under a new viewpoint (e.g. the two competing verbless relatives in Greek); 3) suggesting some possible new members of the isogloss by applying the parametrised approach to previously unnoticed data (e.g. Khotanese, Middle Indo-Aryan, Carian). In conclusion, after a typological comparison with a parallel development in some Semitic languages, an attempt is made to describe and explain the grammatical motivations that could have initiated this phenomenon.

Language change and linguistic theory: The case of archaic Indo-European conjunction

Transactions of the Philological Society, 2019

Many archaic Indo-European languages exhibit a system of dual conjunction in which they possess both a head-initial exponent (e.g., Latin et) and an enclitic exponent (e.g., Latin ⸗que). Mitrović (2014) and Mitrović and Sauerland (2016) argue that these two types of conjunctions instantiate the universal lexical categories J and μ. Several syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties are argued to result from this categorial distinction. For instance, J conjunctions are claimed to lack additive readings (i.e., ‘too, also’). Diachronically, head-initial conjunctions are predicted to originate from combinations of J and μ heads (Mitrović and Sauerland 2016: 489). A closer look at the data reveals that neither of these predictions is borne out. The empirical motivation for the J/μ distinction is in fact paltry. I therefore offer a new history of Indo-European conjunction, in which I demonstrate first that the earliest attested Indo-European languages do not have this double system of conjunction. It is rather an innovation that resulted from the recruitment of new conjunctions across the family. These new conjunctions developed primarily from additive focus operators, and not from combinations of J and μ heads. Empirical issues aside, the analysis of Mitrović (2014) and Mitrović and Sauerland (2016) raises deeper questions about the relationship between linguistic theory and language change. I argue that some of the properties of natural language that Mitrović (2014) and Mitrović and Sauerland (2016) assign to Universal Grammar are better analyzed as epiphenomena of language change.