Typology, grammaticalization, and the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European case system (original) (raw)

Recent publications have challenged many of the long-held assumptions about the reconstruction and prehistory of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) case system. In this lecture, I summarize these findings and evaluate their importance for Indo-European (IE) and general historical linguistics. Not only is the number of cases to be reconstructed for PIE called into question, but the agglutinative or “secondary” cases of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages, long regarded as typologically odd, are shown to be well motivated developments with numerous parallels within IE and elsewhere. The semantic reinterpretation of adverbial markers as case markers, and the grammaticalization of postpositional phrases as univerbated case forms, must have been taking place already in the late stages of the protolanguage. These results allow us to view the notoriously complex PIE case system, with its elaborate system of portmanteau endings marking case, number, and inflectional class, in wider typological perspective, and to better understand its historical evolution in the various IE languages.

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