Syntax and Syntactic Reconstruction - Universitetet i Bergen

To appear in The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ed. by Claire Bowern and Bethwyn Evans

Syntax and Syntactic Reconstruction*

Jóhanna Barðdal University of Bergen

1. Introduction The goal of this chapter is to present an overview of earlier and current research on syntactic reconstruction and illustrate how such a reconstruction may be carried out. Earlier structuralist and generative scholars of the last decades of the 20th century took a strong aversion to syntactic reconstruction, aversion which is still found among many contemporary historical syntacticians. This view is gradually changing, however, and more and more concurrent linguists are arguing for the feasibility of syntactic reconstruction. Particularly within the framework of Construction Grammar has it been argued that syntactic reconstruction is not only achievable, but may also be quite successful. In addition, historical syntacticians from a diversity of frameworks have started coming forward to propose different methods of syntactic reconstructions within their respective models.

The chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 gives an overview of earlier research on syntactic reconstruction and the problems that have been proposed as invalidating it as an empirical enterprise. Counterarguments to this argumentation will be presented. Section 3 is devoted to theories of language change, in particular the kind of changes one finds with argument structure constructions and their case frames. Section 4 presents the preliminaries of syntactic reconstruction, including identifying cognates, setting up correspondence sets, and modeling a grammar on the basis of a specific set of data with the aid of the formalism of Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Section 5 illustrates further the viability of syntactic reconstruction with a case study from work in progress on how new case frames may arise, with examples from the Indo-European language family. The grammar of a proto-stage and the relevant language change involved, will be modeled and couched in the Cognitive Construction Grammar formalism, illustrating how the tools of the Construction Grammar framework may be employed to capture the emergence of new case frames in prehistory. 2. Syntactic Reconstruction: “Aye, there’s the rub!” Historical-comparative linguistics, as it was developed and practiced in the latter part of the 18th and the first part of the 19th century, was mostly focused on phonological, morphological and lexical reconstruction. The work of the Neogrammarians was considerably less focused on syntax, although some specific syntactic issues did not escape their interest. The issue of word order was already prominent at the time (cf. Jolly 1872, Jacobi 1897, Wackernagel 1892, Thommen 1905, Fischer 1924), and there was also a lively interest in the relation between main and subordinate clauses and whether subordinate clauses existed in the early Indo-European languages or not (Avery 1881, Hermann 1895, Brugmann 1925, Porzig

* I thank Serena Danesi, Tonya Kim Dewey, Thórhallur Eythórsson, Spike Gildea, and the audience at the LSA Satellite workshop on the Foundations of Historical Linguistics in Boston in January 2013 for discussions. I thank Luc Steels and Remi van Trijp for illuminating discussions on theories of language change. I am also indebted to Valentina Tsepeleva for help with the Russian data and Valgerður Bjarnadóttir for help with the Lithuanian data. Finally, I thank Claire Bowern for extensive comments that have substantially improved the quality of this chapter. This research was supported with a generous grant from the Norwegian Research Council (NonCanCase).


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1932). Case syntax was also the subject of some curiosity (Winkler 1896, van der Meer 1901, Delbrück 1907, Havers 1911), and syntactic comparisons as well, of for instance imperatives, optatives and conjunctives (Jolly 1872, Thurneysen 1885, Delbrück 1893–1900).

The earliest syntactic reconstructions, carried out by the Neogrammarians (Delbrück 1893–1900, Wackernagel 1892), were confined to phenomena such as word order, the placement of the verb, and clitics. However, the reconstruction methodology that the Neogrammarians developed was based on material from phonology, morphology and the lexicon, while syntactic reconstruction was, to a large extent, left behind. In addition to the general lack of interest in syntax at the time, there is another reason as well for the puniness of syntactic reconstruction and the sparseness of attempts at developing such a methodology among the Neogrammarians, namely the view, current at the time, that syntactic structures are not simple form–meaning correspondences like words (cf. Klein 2010). Hence the meaning of a sentence was not a simplex structure but made up of the combination of the meanings of the lexical items instantiating that sentence. This, in turn, ruled out reconstruction on the basis of syntactic structures, because the reconstruction methodology that the Neogrammarians had developed, the Comparative Method, was based on simple form–meaning correspondences. That was the unit of comparanda that the Comparative Method was based on; hence, lack of simple form–meaning correspondences also entailed lack of the ability to reconstruct. During the 1970s, a new methodology to reconstruct syntax was suggested on the basis of the typological universals that Greenberg (1963) had established. It was Lehmann (1973, 1974) who took the unprecedented step to reconstruct basic word order for Proto-Indo-European, a reconstruction which was met with severe skepticism at the time (Watkins 1976, Jeffers 1976, Winter 1984), and this skepticism has continued into modern times (Lightfoot 1979, 2002, 2006, Harrison 2003, Holland 2003, Pires & Thomason 2008, Mengden 2008, inter alia). Lehmann’s approach has first and foremost been criticized for his presentation of typological tendencies as universals, and also for assuming that the proto-language was typologically consistent with regard to the bundle of word order universals that were included in his reconstruction, a consistency which is rarely found in the languages of today. Another feature of the grammar of Proto-Indo-European that has been subject to reconstruction is its alignment system. It has been argued since the 1970s that Proto-Indo-European must have been a Stative–Active language system and that the case marking of intransitive predicates was semantically motivated (see Klimov 1973, 1977, Schmidt 1979, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995[1984], Lehmann 1989, and Bauer 2000; for a critical approach, see Drinka 1999). A major problem with both of these approaches, the typological approach to word order and the Stative–Active approach to the Proto-Indo-European alignment system, is that they are not entirely based on facts of the daughter languages but take into consideration a bundle of properties that are assumed to cluster together. It has now become clear that the ancillary properties, usually assumed to accompany Stative–Active languages, are areally motivated and not causally linked together (Nichols 1990). This has resulted in the debunking of the Stative–Active hypothesis for Proto-Indo-European (Wichmann 2008). What the history of both of these approaches should teach us is that any reliable reconstruction should be based on the properties of the daughter languages and these properties alone, and not on any coincidentally concomitant properties that may or may not appear as causally related.

There are five major obstacles that have been discussed in the literature as pertaining to the reconstructability of syntax. These are:

• Lack of Cognates • Lack of Arbitrariness


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• Lack of Directionality in Syntactic Change • Lack of Continuous Transmission • Lack of Simple Form–Meaning Correspondences

I will now discuss each of these in turn.

Starting with the claim that there are no cognates in syntax, or that they cannot easily be identified, the general view during the early 1970’s was exactly that comparing sentences across related languages would be an exercise that does not involve cognates, except for perhaps the coincidental lexical cognates that might be found in “comparable” sentences. Jeffers (1976) was a strong advocate of this view, pointing out that even though one may be able to compare the underlying sentence patterns found in utterances, there is still the problem of sentence patterns not evolving in the same way as sounds do. Hence, Jeffers claims, there is no one-to-one correspondence of sentence patterns from one stage of a language to the other, as one finds with sounds.

Jeffers is right, of course, that the nature of the development of sentence patterns may be different from the nature of the development of sounds. This, however, does not automatically mean that there are no cognates in syntax or that they cannot be identified. Recent research on argument structure, for instance, has shown that case frames may be incredibly stable across time periods, while the lexical predicates instantiating them are renewed (Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, 2012a, Melis & Flores 2012). Consider the case frames in Early Germanic, Old Russian, Lithuanian, Latin, and Ancient Greek in Table 1, where it is shown that several case patterns are found across multiple branches.

Table 1: Rare case frames across five Indo-European branches

Germanic Old Russian Lithuanian Latin A. Greek

Acc-Nom √ √ √ √ √ Dat-Nom √ √ √ √ √ Gen-Nom √ √ √ √ Acc-Gen √ √ √ Dat-Gen √ √ √ √ √

Of these case frames, at least two are extremely rare crosslinguistically, the Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen case frames (see the discussion in Section 5.1 below). Of the Indo-European branches, Acc-Gen is found in three, Germanic, Baltic and Italic, while Dat-Gen is found in all five branches. It should also be noted that the case markers are also cognates. We are, of course, well aware of the fact the dative has merged with the locative in Ancient Greek and with the locative, ablative and instrumental in Germanic (cf. Luraghi 1987, Barðdal & Kulikov 2009). Generally, the mergers between and across inflectional paradigms are well known and do not constitute a problem for syntactic reconstruction. This overview of case frames illustrates that one way of identifying cognates in syntax is through morphology (cf. Watkins 1964, Fox 1995, Gildea 1998, Kikusawa 2003, Harris 2008, Barðdal 2013). Here I have discussed case morphology and patterns of case morphology, but other morphological clues may also be found, depending on the type of syntactic data to be reconstructed.

Turning to the second bulleted point above, the arbitrariness requirement, one of the reasons that the Comparative Method has been regarded as a successful method for reconstructing earlier stages of languages is because of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. That is, because the mapping between the form and the meaning of a word is arbitrary, one can be sure that when one finds language after language with the apparent same form–meaning mapping, this mapping has arisen because of a common history. For instance, consider the verb lust in English. There is absolutely nothing in the form of lust that tells us


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that it means ‘lust’, and vice versa, there is nothing in the meaning of ‘lust’ that tells us that the form should be lust. We must therefore assume that the meaning pairing the form lust and the meaning ‘lust’ is an arbitrary one.

Now, consider the verbs lysta ‘desire, long for’ in Icelandic and lusten ‘enjoy’ in German. The forms are similar enough between the three languages, English, Icelandic and Germanic, to be inherited and the meaning is also similar enough to have developed from a common proto-meaning. We can therefore safely assume that the three verbs in the three languages are cognate verbs, i.e. verbs inherited from a common proto-stage (cf. Section 4.2 below). If the relation between form and meaning were not an arbitrary one, but somehow iconic, as with traffic signs, or somehow derivable from our knowledge of the world or from some general semantic principles, one could not argue that similarity in form and similarity in meaning across languages constituted an argument for historical relationships, since then such similarity would be derived from one or the other of these. However, the fact that the pairing between the form and meaning of lexical units is in fact an arbitrary one makes lexical comparisons an essential part of the Comparative Method and vital for establishing genetic relations. This has also led, for instance, Harrison (2003) to argue that since syntactic reconstruction is only done on languages which have already been shown to be genetically related, the demand for an arbitrary form–meaning correspondences in syntax is simply redundant.

The general view in linguistics has been that sentences are not arbitrary form–meaning correspondences, hence they do not fulfill the requirement of being arbitrary signs (Harrison 2003). Because of that, one cannot reconstruct syntactic structures either. This is, of course, not entirely true. There are certainly structures in languages that show characteristics of being arbitrary form–meaning correspondences, like the infamous English Incredulity Construction “Him (be) a doctor! No way!” (Akmajian 1984, Lambrecht 1990). The Incredulity Construction can presumably not be reconstructed for an earlier stage of West Germanic, or Germanic for that matter, but some arbitrary aspects of constructions may still be found that can be of value for syntactic reconstruction. With regard to argument structure, for instance, in particular noncanonical case marking, it may be that a construction has its own niche, such as occurring with verbs from a specific semantic field, like the oblique subject construction in the Indo-European languages, which targets experience-based and happenstance predicates (cf. Barðdal et al. 2012). Within these semantic fields, it may be arbitrary which lexical predicates instantiate the oblique subject construction and which do not (cf. Barðdal & Smitherman 2013), since the lexicon is not always consistent in which predicates of the targeted type show up with this behavior. This is in line with Watkins’ (1995) reconstruction of a poetic formula for how to kill a dragon in the Indo-European languages, where he shows that despite the fact that dragon myths may be a cultural universal, it is still possible to identify features in the language and style of such myths that are specific to a given language family, the Indo-European language family in this case. Therefore, it is in no way excluded that the arbitrariness requirement may be met in syntax.

The third point on the bulleted list above involves the lack of directionality in syntactic change. One of the main arguments put forward against syntactic reconstruction is the lack of syntactic laws, equivalent to the sound laws, which are supposed to aid us in our choices of which alternant to reconstruct and which not. This has also been referred to in the literature as lack of directionality in syntactic change. The demand for syntactic laws or directionality comes from the perceived opinion that the sound laws in phonology are exceptionless and that as such they provide information on the direction a sound change may take, i.e. from A to B rather than from B to A.

The view that the sound laws are exceptionless is an illusion, I believe (cf. Hoenigswald 1987, Mazoudon & Lowe 1994, Harrison 2003, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012a, Garrett this volume). There are several semi-regular sound processes found in phonology, but these are by


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definition excluded from the category of sound laws. Many of the phonological processes are also governed by the nature of adjacent sounds, sometimes referred to as combinatorial changes. Others, however, are not governed by adjacent sounds, but apply systematically in all instances where they can apply. For such systematic changes that are not governed by adjacent sounds, the sound laws do not tell us which alternant is older. In this case, some internal reconstruction is needed or more research needs to be carried out on the sum and substance of the data.

Harrison (2003) argues, moreover, that the main function of the sound laws is to provide the method with a similarity metric for evaluating whether two forms are close enough in shape to be considered derived from the same parent word. Without the sound laws, there would be no principled way of deciding how similar two forms must be in order to be analyzed as cognates. This is one of the reasons why the sound laws have had such a strong position in the field.

It is certainly true that the directionality of syntactic change is an under-researched topic. However, that should not stop us from reconstructing grammar and syntax, as only through more work on historical syntax will possible directionality of syntactic change be unearthed. Also, through a proper investigation of the data under investigation, the directionality of a given change may be discovered. Several investigations of syntactic change, investigations that include syntactic reconstruction, have been successful, despite the lack of established “syntactic laws.” One such was carried out by Gildea (2000) and another by Willis (2011).

Gildea (2000) reconstructs constituency, the word order internal to the verb phrase, for Proto-Cariban on the basis of the interaction between word order and cognate prefixes and particles and their distribution across different types of sentence patterns and argument structures. Willis (2011) reconstructs relative clauses for Common Brythonic by systematically recognizing and excluding layers of innovations, until reaching the oldest layers of the Brythonic data. A careful analysis of the structures of relative clauses with and without negation, with and without relative pronouns, and with and without wh-pronouns reveals different historical scenarios which Willis then compares with each other. Further facts of the Brythonic languages are used to distinguish between the two scenarios and to reach a conclusion about the historical development of free relative clauses in Brythonic.

One of the main contributions of Willis’ work is his emphasis on the locality vs. universality of language change. Not unexpectedly for those who subscribe to the view that syntactic reconstruction is a viable enterprise, Willis argues that in many cases a proper consideration of the full range of the relevant data will reveal which stages are earlier and which are later in the development. While recognizing that the universality of syntactic change is an idealization, Willis strongly argues that the directionality of syntactic change is local instead. That is, it is anchored in the facts of the data under scrutiny, including an evaluation of the possible extensions and reanalyses that may have taken place, all of which must be consistent with different historical layers of data and the language system at large. Thus, even though “universal” syntactic changes are controversial and only reveal statistical tendencies, local directions of language change may well be identifiable.

Turning to the fourth bulleted point above, one of the arguments figuring in the literature against syntactic reconstruction is that there is a fundamental difference between lexical units and grammar, in the sense that new generations of language learners learn lexical units and grammar differently. Lightfoot (1979, inter alia) argues that the lexicon is transmitted continuously from one generation to the other while the grammar is not. Instead, Lightfoot argues, language learners have to build up their grammar on the basis of the input, while at the same time they inherit the lexicon. It seems that this opinion is based on a rather naïve view of the lexicon, as Adger (2003) has pointed out. Lexical units are also abstract units that have to be inferred from the input. Observe also that on Lightfoot’s view of grammar, as


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rules working on lexical items, arranging lexical items into constituents and constituents into sentences, it may be hard to conceptualize the idea that grammar is learned in the same way that lexical items are learned. This is because rules are in essence regarded as being ontologically very different from words.

On a constructional approach, in contrast, the basic units of grammar are constructions, i.e. learned form–meaning pairings, and one of the research problems the Construction Grammar community has been working on is showing that grammatical constructions are learned in the same way as lexical items are learned (Tomasello 2003, 2006, Abbott-Smith & Tomasello 2006). In other words, whether rules are acquired differently from words by new generations of speakers seems to be a matter of theoretical leaning. On a constructional approach, as already stated, words and constructions are acquired in the same way, namely as abstract form–meaning pairings, and as such both are subject to the restrictions of the Comparative Method. A constructional approach, therefore, invalidates this criticism of syntactic reconstruction.

Finally, let us consider the fifth bulleted point above. The idea that there are no form–meaning correspondences in syntax, as opposed to in morphology and in the lexicon, is based on a conception of syntax, in which the meaning of a sentence is taken to be derived from the meaning of its lexical parts. According to this conception, which is also the traditional conception of syntax, there can be no meaning to syntax itself. However, with the rise of grammatical semantics during the 1980’s (cf. for instance Mohanan & Wee 1999 and the references cited there), it has become more and more accepted that grammar has meaning in itself, irrespective of the lexical units found in the relevant grammatical environment. One can say that this view gradually led to the development of the framework of Construction Grammar (Fillmore, Kay & O’Connor 1987, Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001), where syntactic units are taken to be form–meaning or form–function correspondences exactly like words and morphemes. The differences between the two views can be illustrated with Figures 1 and 2, exemplifying the dative subject predicate in Icelandic, hitna ‘get warm’: (1) Henni hitnar. she.DAT warms ‘She gets warm.’ Figure 1: The traditional conception of meaning in grammar and syntax

SYN Henni hitnar

SEM HENNI HITNAR Lexical Unit

The upper boxes in Figure 1 represent the syntactic structure and the bold line between the two elements in the syntax represents syntactic relations. The lower boxes represent the semantic structure, consisting of two units, and the simple line between them represents the semantic relation between the two semantic units. There are also dotted lines between the


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element in the syntax and the unit in the semantics, the first between Henni and HENNI and the second one between hitnar and HITNAR. These dotted lines represent the symbolic relation between the form and the meaning. There is, in other words, only a symbolic relation between the form and the meaning for each of the two lexical units, Henni/HENNI and hitnar/HITNAR. The lexical units, in turn, are marked with an outer (vertical) box circumscribing both the form and the meaning of each of the two lexical units represented in Figure 1. On a constructional approach, in contrast, the whole unit is regarded as a construction, hence there is an outer box around the construction as a whole. There are also (horizontal) boxes around the SYN field as a whole and the SEM field as a whole. Marking each field, SYN and SEM, as a unit in its own right is needed to account for irregular syntax combined with regular meaning, and idiosyncratic meaning combined with regular syntax. Finally, there is a symbolic link between the two fields, SYN and SEM. This is how constructions become form–meaning pairings in Construction Grammar. Figure 2: The constructional approach to grammar as form–meaning pairings

Construction SYN Henni hitnar

SEM HENNI HITNAR Lexical Unit

It is particularly the symbolic link between SYN and SEM as a whole, the one in the middle of Figure 2., that captures the form–meaning pairing of constructions, which exists irrespective of the pairing between the form and the meaning of the lexical units instantiating the construction. To summarize, both on the traditional conception of syntax and the more contemporary conceptions found within modern linguistic frameworks it is not assumed that grammar or syntax has meaning or function in itself, hence there can be no form–meaning mapping in syntax. The meaning of the whole is assumed to be a sum of the meaning of the parts. In contrast, on a constructional account, the mapping between form and meaning is a more intricate one, with form–meaning mappings found at two different levels, both the lexical level but also the grammatical level. It is this mapping at the grammatical level that makes syntactic units or grammar no different from lexical units in being form–meaning correspondences, and as such they provide pertinent material for the Comparative Method. Before illustrating how syntactic reconstruction may be carried out, and how the grammar of proto-stages may be modeled (Section 4), let us consider how different theories of language change may be relevant for reconstruction.


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3. Theories of Language Change 3.1 General Theories of Language Change A change in language can take place at different levels of the language, for instance within the sound system, the morphological system, the syntactic system, at the semantic level, at the usage level, or any combination of these. The mechanisms behind language change are not well known, and they may also vary depending on which part of the language system one is dealing with. Changes within phonological systems, for instance, are often governed by adjacent sounds, and the number of changes one can find are much more limited in number than for morphosyntactic changes. This is evidently so because phonological systems are smaller and contain fewer linguistic units than the grammar, where morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors interact with each other, and may intersect in different ways, contributing to different kind of changes. There are several processes of language change that are well known, such as analogy, metaphorical extension, metonymic extension, generalization vs. specialization of meaning, to mention a few (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2002, Urban this volume). Changes in frequency can also contribute to a change in the language system, and pragmatic inferences are well known to affect not only the meaning of lexical items but also grammar, for instance the meaning of larger grammatical constructions (Traugott 1989, Michaelis & Ruppenhofer 2001). This may result in lexicalizations, i.e. lexicalized set phrases, grammaticalizations, i.e. lexical items that have turned into grammatical items, or other kinds of reanalysis involving remapping of form–meaning correspondences, so that new form–meaning correspondence arise, different from the original ones (cf. Croft 2000, Hopper & Traugott 2003, Frajzyngier this volume).

Several conditions contributing to language change are also well known, such as language contact and borrowing, and social factors like prestige, cultural changes, and migration (see Lucas this volume). Theories of language change include the following:

• the child-based theory of language change that generative grammar has espoused for

several decades now (Lightfoot 1979, and later work, van Gelderen this volume, Stanford this volume);

• variation-based sociolinguistic theories of language change that take change to be based on existing patterns of variation (Weinrich, Labov & Herzog 1968)

• utterance-based theories of language change, which take language use as their point of departure, and where adults have a more prominent role in the process than children (Croft 2000)

One example of an utterance-based approach to language change is the grammaticalization paradigm and pragmatically-based approaches to language change (cf. Diewald & Smirnova 2010, inter alia). Recently, a framework dealing particularly with constructional change “Diachronic Construction Grammar” has been developed (Fried 2009, 2011, Barðdal 2011, Hilpert 2013, Traugott & Trousdale 2013), also an utterance-based framework.

Despite the models listed above, which all provide some research designs and blueprints to model language change, there are yet to be found adequate theories of language change that predict either which changes will take place, when, or how they will happen. One reason is, of course that change is seeded by variation and is stochastic at the population level. Also, language change is quite a heterogeneous phenomenon. Within syntax, for instance, there are several different processes at work, like analogy, reanalysis, metaphorical extensions, etc, but because the grammatical systems where these processes are found can be so different, very different language changes may be found. One example is the extension of the


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Impersonal Passive Construction in Icelandic and German in different ways. Consider examples (2a–b) below, of the Impersonal Passive in the two languages: Icelandic: (2) a. Það var dansað í gær. it was danced in yesterday ‘There was some dancing yesterday.’ German (2) b. Es wurde gestern getanzt. it was yesterday danced ‘There was some dancing yesterday.’ This construction was originally confined to unergatives in both Icelandic and German, i.e. intransitive predicates expressing a volitional event, but it turns out that the construction has developed along a syntactic cline in Icelandic (Maling & Sigurjónsdóttir 2002, Barðdal & Molnár 2003, Eythórsson 2008, Jónsson 2009), but a semantic cline in German (cf. Primus 2011). This has presumably taken place through an intermediate stage of accommodating unaccusatives in the construction, i.e. intransitive predicates expressing non-volitional events. In other words, in Modern Icelandic transitive predicates may now occur in the Impersonal Passive Construction, while in Modern German predicates with inanimate, and hence non-volitional, subjects are found in the Impersonal Passive: Icelandic: (3) a. og auðvitað var notað orf og ljá and of.course was used handle.ACC and scythe.ACC ‘and of course one used scythe’ or: ‘and of course a scythe was used.’

(http://mennta.hi.is/vefir/saga/torf/2004/saegudm/vinna.htm) German: (3) b. Aber geblüht wird nur, wenn die Pflanze auch etwas älter ist. but blossomed becomes only when the plant also somewhat older is ‘But there is blossoming only when the plant is a bit older.’ (Primus 2011: 92) The Icelandic passive vera notað ‘be used’ in (3a) occurs here together with the object of its active counterpart, evident from the fact that this object is in the accusative case, orf og ljá ‘handle and scythe’, and not in the nominative case, as if it would if it had been promoted to subject through the passivization process. The German passive geblühen werden ‘be (in a state of) blossom’ in (3b) expresses a non-volitional event with an inanimate, and hence, a non-agentive subject in its active counterpart. The example in (3a) is ungrammatical in German and (3b) is likewise ungrammatical in Icelandic, while (2a–b) are grammatical in both languages.

Since Icelandic and German both have the Impersonal Passive Construction, shown in (2a–b) above, the question arises as to why they have developed differently. Assuming that the construction was originally functionally equivalent across the two languages, these language-specific developments could have taken place because there are other differences between Icelandic and German that affect the development of the construction so that it evolves along different paths. Another possibility is that there are different cognitive processes at work in the “collective linguistic mind” of the community of speakers, leading to different types of extensions. Also, the Impersonal Passive Construction could be a part of a network of constructions which have different inventories in the two languages, which in turn may restrain possible developments, the interaction with other parts of the grammar may be different, or the frequencies of use may vary, contributing to differences in constructional


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salience, or entrenchment, between the two languages, again affecting the route a possible change may take. At present, no proper answers exist to these questions.

However, the fact that there are limits to our existing theories of language change does not compel us to abandon syntactic reconstruction at all. Non-predictive theories may certainly be insightful as to identifying the different processes at work. In a way, historical syntax is in its early stages in the sense that there is an abundance in historical syntax yet to be discovered, and there is no doubt that advances in historical linguistic research will further strengthen our abilities to do syntactic reconstruction.

The remainder of this chapter will be focused on reconstructing argument structure and case frames for proto-stages. Therefore, a few words on the types of changes one finds with morphological case and valency frames are in order. 3.2 Changes in Argument Structure Particularly for case marking and argument structure, several different types of changes have been documented in the field of historical syntax. Some of these are listed below:

• Case markers merge either functionally or phonologically • Case markers or case patterns fall into disuse • Case markers develop new functions • Augmentation of argument structure • Arguments develop into expletives • Expletives develop into arguments • Changes in lexical semantics drive forward changes in argument structure • Semantically similar predicates exchange argument structures • High-frequent patterns attract predicates from low-frequent patterns • New case markers arise • New case patterns arise

There is abundant work on functional or phonological mergers of case markers in the history of, for instance, the Indo-European language family, both the ancient languages (Luraghi 1987, Kulikov 2013) and the more modern varieties like French (Detges 2009), English (Allen 1995) and Swedish (Wessén 1965). For many of the modern Indo-European languages, this has taken place even to a degree that it may seem that this was their “intended” destiny all along, a teleological process, with subsequent loss of case morphology altogether. In addition to that, it is also known to happen that specific case markers or case patterns fall into disuse. The genitive in Faroese, for instance, has fallen into disuse and disappeared from the language (Thráinsson et al. 2012: 248–252). At the same time, specific valency patterns, like the Dat-Gen case frame, where the first subject-like argument is in the dative and the second object-like argument is in the genitive, have been lost in, for instance, the history of Icelandic and German (Barðdal 2009). It is also quite common that case markers develop new functions altogether, and one such case is documented in Meithei by Chelliah (2009) who shows that the agentive, patient, locative and associative markers in that Tibeto-Burman language have developed a new pragmatic function through a process of metonymy, namely that of expressing newness or surprise by the speaker (see also Noonan 2009 for a crosslinguistic overview of the evolution of several relational markers in the Tibeto-Burman languages). Another development of a similar type is documented by Sadler (2009) for Japanese. Sadler shows how the dative particle ni has developed from marking stative locations in Old Japanese to marking, for instance, recipients and dative subjects in Modern Japanese, through the well-known process of subjectification.


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One example of augmentation of argument structure comes from the history of English, where several different verbal suffixes had a transitivizing effect, like -j/-i, -na, -se and others (cf. van Gelderen 2011 and the references there). This is a development from non-causative to causative, with a concomitant addition of an argument to the valency of the verb. An example of an intransitive non-causative variant that has disappeared from the language is with the verb grasp which was originally an intransitive verb, which then became transitive through an addition of a -se suffix, grapse, again becoming grasp through metathesis (OED). At some point the intransitive variant has disappeared leaving only the transitive derived variant in the language, resulting in something that looks like an augmentation of the argument structure. Another example of augmentation is when an expletive develops into an argument. All the Germanic languages have developed an expletive with a set of unaccusative verbs, presentationals, and even with oblique subject predicates. For several of these languages, the original expletive has become a part of the argument structure, inverting with the verb in questions, being omissible in control constructions, etc. The German expletive es has become obligatory with weather verbs, for instance, inverting with the verb in questions, etc. (Abraham 2001): Declarative (4a) a. Es regnet noch! it.EXPL rains certainly ‘It certainly rains!’ Question (4b) b. Regnet es noch? vs. *Regnet noch?

rained it still rained still ‘Does it still rain?’

Through this process, the expletive does not solely function as an expletive anymore, but has acquired argument status. The opposite development, that arguments develop into expletives, is also known (Jóhannsdóttir 1992, Falk 1993). The Icelandic expletive það ‘it’ and the Swedish expletive det ‘it’, have both developed from the personal pronoun ‘it’, which of course was an argument in the source sentences from which the expletive developed. This, however, does not mean that expletives must develop from arguments. In English and Danish, the expletive has developed from a locative adverb, there and der ‘there’, respectively. It is also well known that verbs can change their argument structure in relation to them changing their lexical semantic meaning. For instance, in Spanish, the verb gustar, meaning ‘like, please’, selects for a non-canonically case-marked first argument, while in Latin it meant ‘taste’ and came with a nominative subject (Melis & Flores 2012). The development first involved a change in meaning from ‘taste’ in Latin with the Nom-Gen case frame, to ‘like’, with a Nom-Acc frame, and then later on, long after gustar had started meaning ‘like’ it changed its case frame to Dat-Nom, on the basis of other predicates with a similar meaning which also selected for the Dat-Nom case frame. The development of gustar from Latin to Modern Spanish thus exemplifies two of the points on the bulleted list above, first there is a change in case marking concomitant with a change in meaning, i.e. a development from ‘taste’ with a Nom-Gen to ‘like’ with a Nom-Acc, and then a change from Nom-Acc to Dat-Nom on the basis of analogy with semantically similar verbs. The opposite tendency has also been documented in the literature, namely that constructions high in type frequency attract items from constructions lower in type frequency. This can involve similarity in meaning or not. One example involving similarity in meaning is


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the infamous Dative Sickness or Dative Substitution in Icelandic, in which accusative subject predicates start occurring with dative subjects instead of accusative (cf. Jónsson & Eythórsson 2005, Barðdal 2011). Different analyses have been presented of this phenomenon, but most if not all approaches agree that this is due to the similarity in meaning between accusative subject predicates and dative subject predicates. The other tendency, not involving a similarity in meaning, has been termed Nominative Sickness or Nominative Substitution in the literature (Eythórsson 2000, 2002). This particular technical term is intended to cover a change from accusative subjects to nominative subjects in languages like Icelandic, Faroese and German where case marking has been maintained, although the same tendency is of course also found in languages where case marking has been lost, like in English, Dutch and the Mainland Scandinavian languages. The mechanism behind this change seems to be simply that high-frequency patterns attract items from low-frequency patterns (cf. Barðdal 2008). One type of change found for instance in the Indo-Iranian languages involves the emergence of new case markers. It is well known that the case system in the Indo-Iranian languages broke down during the middle ages, only to arise again with new morphological markers with quite similar kinds of functional distinctions as earlier (cf. Butt & Ahmed 2011 and the references therein). Particularly for Indo-Aryan, a new accusative/dative marker emerged, through an extension or a reanalysis of an already existing spatial postposition, hence reintroducing semantic distinctions that had gone lost through the earlier demolishing of the Middle Indo-Aryan case system. Examples of new case frames coming into existence are also known. This can happen for instance through a change in one of the case markers, like through Dative Sickness in Icelandic where accusative subjects change into dative subjects. For predicates that select for the Acc-Acc case frame, this results in a new case frame, namely Dat-Acc. Another example of this type, of new case frames emerging, will be discussed in Section 5.1 below, where new case frames seem to have emerged in several Indo-European languages through valency reduction, and hence detransitivization. 4. The Preliminaries of Syntactic Reconstruction 4.1 Recent Advances in the field Despite the strong opinion against syntactic reconstruction, there are some scholars who have consistently argued for the possibility of reconstructing syntax. The most influential ones are of course Harris and Campbell, who, in a series of publications have presented the argument that syntactic reconstruction is indeed possible (Campbell 1990, Harris & Campbell 1995, Campbell & Harris 2002, Campbell 2003, Harris 2008). Following in their footsteps, Gildea (1998) has argued the same, in an extensive study of the morphosyntax of the Cariban languages, showing how different layers of historical developments can be teased apart, and how the oldest layer of grammar may be identified.

More recently, scholars from different theoretical persuasions have started approaching the issue within their respective frameworks. Kikusawa (2002, 2003) has reconstructed ergative as an alignment type for Proto-Central Pacific within Lexicase Grammar. Willis (2011) has reconstructed the syntax of free relative clauses for Common Brythonic in a generative approach. Longobardi has developed a method, the Parametric Comparison Method, intended for reconstructing languages and their parametric variation, based on the generative syntax concept of parameters (Longobardi et al. 2013).


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One distinct framework that lends itself particularly suited for syntactic reconstruction is the framework of Construction Grammar. There are several reasons for this. One is that the incremental steps of language change, and hence the gradualness of language change, are easily modeled within the formalism of Construction Grammar (Fried 2009, 2013). A second reason is that Construction Grammar assumes that all linguistic units are form–meaning or form–function correspondences, and as explained above, form–meaning correspondences are the unit of comparison that the Comparative Method is based on. Therefore, the leap from synchronic form–meaning correspondences to historical form–meaning correspondences is minimal.

As alluded to by Hamp (1984), one of the major reasons that the Neogrammarians and the early structuralists did not succeed in syntactic reconstruction was because of the perceived lack of semantics in syntax. However, the requirement to implement semantics is met on a constructional approach to syntactic reconstruction, as discussed in Section 2 above. Watkins (1964) also points out that any continuation of morphological form in a correspondence set will aid in syntactic reconstruction.

With regard to argument structure, there are several types of form that are relevant here. First, the morphological markers may be cognate forms (cf. Fox 1995: 105), as pointed out above, the predicates instantiating the argument structure construction may also represent cognate form (Harris 2008), and finally the word order distribution of syntactic categories may also be considered form (Kikusawa 2002, 2003). In order to present the basics of potential syntactic reconstruction, let us proceed to section 4.2 below. 4.2 Identifying Cognates in Argument Structure To carry out a syntactic reconstruction, certain procedural steps must be taken. First, one has to identify the cognates. Consider the following examples (taken from Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012b: 386–387) from Old High German, Old Saxon, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic: Old High German (5) a. nu dih es so wel lustit now you.ACC it.GEN so well desires ‘now that you desire it so well’ (Hildebrandslied 59) Old Saxon (5) b. that ina bigan bi thero mennisko that him.ACC began because.of the.DAT humanity.DAT

môses lustean meat.GEN desire.INF

‘that because of his humanity, he began to desire meat’ (Heliand 1060) Old English (5) c. Hine nānes þinges ne lyste on ðisse worulde him.ACC no.GEN thing.GEN not desire on this world ‘He desired nothing in this world’ (Boethius Cons.Phil. 35,6) Old Norse-Icelandic (5) d. er þig lysti þessa when you.ACC desired that.GEN ‘when you desire that’ (Ljósvetningasaga, ch. 19)


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All four examples contain the same verb ‘lust’ and all four occur with the same case frame, Acc-Gen. Notice that the accusative second pronoun ‘you’ in Old High German and Old Norse-Icelandic are cognates and that the accusative third person pronoun ‘him’ in Old Saxon and Old English are cognates as well. In general the case markers within Germanic are cognate with each other. The verb ‘lust’ is also a cognate verb across the two Germanic subbranches and the four languages; the phonological form is clearly related and the meaning is the same ‘lust’. We can thus reconstruct a verb ‘lust’ for Proto-Germanic as shown in Table 2, deriving it from the noun *lustuz ‘lust, pleasure’, which is the generally assumed etymology for this verb in Germanic:

Table 2: Lexical correspondence sets for the verb ‘lust’ in Germanic FORM MEANING RECONSTRUCTED

FORM Old High German lusten ‘lust’

*lustijan- Old Saxon lustean ‘lust’ Old English lystan ‘lust’ Old Norse-Icelandic lysta ‘lust’

Observe that the stem of the verb ‘lust’ in Old High German and Old Saxon contains the non-umlauted vowel -u-, while Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic show the umlauted -y- in the stem, caused by i-umlaut. The forms in Old High German and Old Saxon are therefore most likely older then the forms in Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic. The forms are therefore systematically related, and I suggest a reconstruction of the verb for Proto-Germanic in the -ijan conjugation, since it covers the endings of all the attested forms given in Table 2. 4.3 Setting Up Correspondence Sets in Syntax We have now identified the morphological and lexical cognates involved in our argument structure, on which basis we can also identify the syntactic cognates, namely the Acc-Gen argument structure. After having determined the correspondence set, it can be set up like in Table 3, which shows only one option for the case frame, namely Acc-Gen. This is a consequence of the fact that complete identity is found across the daughters with regard to the case pattern of the verb ‘lust.’

Table 3: Correspondence set for the ACC-GEN-lust argument-structure construction Alt. 1 Old High German ACC-GEN-lusts Old Saxon ACC-GEN-lusts Old English ACC-GEN-lusts Old Norse-Icelandic ACC-GEN-lusts

Observe, that the lack of other options in Table 3 means that there is simply no variation to choose from. Hence, no decision has to be made about the internal order of a given language change, either reconstructable on the basis of the details of the data presented here or on the basis of our general knowledge of language change. This, however, does not mean that such a reconstruction is trumpery and of no worth. The value of such a reconstruction stands in a direct relation to the motive behind the reconstruction. One reason for doing reconstruction is to model the history of a given structure, and hence the possible developmental paths of that structure. A reconstruction on the basis of identity is therefore of value if it is proposed against


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a null hypothesis based on the idea that the relevant structures have changed (cf. Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012a, Barðdal & Smitherman 2013). 4.4 Modeling Syntactic Reconstruction On the basis of the correspondence set in Table 3, and the identity across the daughters, a reconstruction of a lexical entry for ‘lust’ and the Acc-Gen argument structure constructions may be suggested as in Figure 3 and 4, respectively. This particular formalism is taken from Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012, Michaelis 2010, 2012) and the lexical entry consists of three fields while the argument structure construction consists of two fields. In the lexical entry in Figure 3, the first field specifies the phonological form of the verb, in this case *lustijan-. The second field, the SYN field, gives the argument structure of the predicate, in this case an accusative and a genitive. The semantics is given in terms of semantic frames, in this particular case the frame of DESIRE, which occurs with an experiencer, here marked in the accusative, and a stimulus, here marked in the genitive. The two participants are coindexed with the two arguments in the SYN field, the experiencer with the accusative and the stimulus with the genitive.

Figure 3: A reconstruction of the Acc-Gen predicate ‘lust’ in Proto-Germanic

lexeme FORM <*lustijan-> SYN ARG-ST <NP-ACCi, NP-GENj>

SEM desire-fr FRAMES EXPERIENCER i STIMULUS j

Figure 4: A reconstruction of the argument structure of ‘lust’ in Proto-Germanic

argument structure cxt SYN ARG-ST <NP-ACCi, NP-GENj>

SEM desire-fr FRAMES EXPERIENCER i STIMULUS j

The lexical entry for ‘lust’ then merges with the argument structure construction in Figure 4 in the grammar of Proto-Germanic. The argument structure construction consists of two fields, a SYN field and a SEM field, which match the SYN and SEM fields of the lexical entry. This


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way, both the lexical properties of the verb ‘lust’ and its argument structure construction may be modeled for Proto-Germanic.

After this overview of the modus operandi of syntactic reconstruction, or at least one possible modus operandi, let us now turn to a case study on the emergence of new case frames in the Indo-European languages. 5. Case Study: The Emergence of New Case Frames in the Early Indo-European

Languages 5.1 The data As many other languages in the world, the Indo-European languages exhibit structures where the subject-like argument is not in the nominative case, but occurs case-marked in some oblique case, like accusative, dative, genitive, etc. Examples are given in (6a–e) below of Romanian, Italian, Hindi, Icelandic and Lithuanian. Romanian: (6) a. Nu îmi aduc aminte ce sa petrecut cu mine. not me.DAT bring to.mind what self.AUX occurs with me ‘I cannot remember what happened to me’ (Caluianu 2013: 233) Italian: (6) b. Le è preso il trip di feisbuk. she.DAT is taken the obsession of facebook ‘She got obsessed with facebook.’ (Benedetti 2013: 18) Hindi: (6) c. Anuu ko Mohan acchaa lagtaa hai. Anu DAT Mohan good seemed is

‘Anu likes Mohan.’ (Montaut 2004: 43) Icelandic: (6) d. Mig verkjaði í hjartað. me.ACC ached in heart.the ‘I had a heartache.’ Lithuanian: (6) e. Mane visą daigo. me.ACC all aches ‘I’m hurting all over.’ Structures of this type in the Indo-European languages differ in important respects from similar structures in other non-related languages and language families. The prototypical structure containing non-nominative subjects is one that we might call the “Dative Subject Experiencer” construction, and it has been documented in language after language, like Korean (Gerdts & Youn 2002), Japanese (Shibatani 1999), Maltese (Haspelmath & Caruana 2000), South Dravidian (Amritavalli 2004), Basque (Rezac 2008) and many others. Consider the following three examples from Japanese, Maltese and Basque, exemplifying the dative subject experiencer pattern in these languages:


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Japanese (7) a. Sensei- ni eigo- ga wakaru. teacher-DAT English-NOM understands ‘The teacher understands English.’ (Shibatani 1999: 50) Maltese (7) b. Lir- raġel jiddispjaċih għall- iżball. OBL.the-man regret.IP.HIM for.the-mistake ‘The man regretted the mistake.’ (Haspelmath & Caruano 2000: 254) Basque (7) c. Kep- ri bere buru-a gustatzen zako Kepa-DAT his head-the.ABS liking took ‘Kepa likes himself.’ (Rezac 2008: 75) The typological data diverges from the Indo-European data in two pronounced ways: First, the Indo-European data show a wide semantic spread across several different verb classes, many of which are not experiencer-like at all. In fact, this is one of the lesser-known peculiarities of the Indo-European languages. Consider the following examples from three different branches of Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Germanic and Baltic: Bengali (8) a. Tren-ta- r bhison deri ho- eche-e. train- the-GEN terribly late becomes-PERF-PRES.3ORD ‘The train has been terribly late.’ (Onishi 2001: 125) Icelandic (8) b. Lestinni seinkaði alveg hræðilega.

train.the.DAT got.delayed quite terribly ‘The train got terribly late.’

Lithuanian (8) c. Gerai arti, pūdymą atlijo, minkšta Good plow earth.ACC is.soaked soft ‘Now it’s good to plow, the earth is soaked and soft’ The second difference between the Indo-European languages and the typological data relates to the case frames found with noncanonically case-marked predicates; what is typical for the Dative Subject Experiencer construction is that the predicates instantiating it select for the Dat-Nom case frame cross-linguistically or they are intransitives with only one argument, which is non-canonically case marked in the dative case. In contrast to what is known from cross-linguistic typological comparisons, the early and ancient Indo-European languages exhibit structures of considerable more variety, shown in Tables 4–6, including inverse structures like Dat-Nom, Acc-Nom and Gen-Nom, as well as the rare Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen case frames. Table 4: Case frames in Germanic

Nom Acc Dat Gen Nom Acc Dat Gen Nom-Acc Acc-Nom Dat-Nom Gen-Nom Nom-Dat Acc-Acc Dat-Gen Gen-PP Nom-Gen Acc-Gen Dat-PP Gen-S Nom-PP Acc-PP Dat-S Nom-S Acc-S


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Table 5: Case frames in Latin Nom Acc Dat Gen Nom Acc Dat Gen Nom-Acc Acc-Nom Dat-Nom Gen-Nom Nom-Dat Acc-Acc Dat-Gen Gen-PP Nom-Gen Acc-Gen Dat-PP Gen-S Nom-PP Acc-PP Dat-S Nom-S Acc-S

Table 6: Case frames in Ancient Greek

Nom Acc Dat Gen Nom Acc Dat Gen Nom-Acc Acc-Nom Dat-Nom (Gen-Nom) Nom-Dat Acc-Acc Dat-Gen (Gen-PP) Nom-Gen Acc-Gen Dat-PP (Gen-S) Nom-PP (Acc-PP) Dat-S Nom-S Acc-S

All three branches are quite similar to each other; all have intransitive predicates where the subject-like argument is case marked in accusative, dative or genitive, both Germanic and Latin have the inverse structures mentioned above, i.e. Acc-Nom and Dat-Nom, all have Dat-Nom and Dat-Gen structures, all have Dat-PP and Dat-S (where S stands for a clause), both Germanic and Latin have Acc-Gen, Acc-PP and Acc-S.

Observe also that the Latin pattern is a subpattern of Germanic with only Acc-Acc missing in Latin. This is indicated with the strikethrough. The Ancient Greek pattern is a subpattern of the Latin and the Germanic patterns, with Acc-Acc and Acc-Gen missing in Ancient Greek. Also, the patterns in Ancient Greek that are given in brackets are patterns that we have not found, but might still exist. As evident from the three tables, there is a major overlap between the three branches.

Consider now corresponding data from Sanskrit, given in Table 7. A comparison between the Sanskrit data, on the one hand, and the Germanic, Latin and Greek data, on the other, reveals that the inverse patterns, Acc-Nom, Dat-Nom and Gen-Nom, are common for all four branches. However, the table cells that are missing in Sanskrit but are found in the other three branches (to varying degrees) contain two case frames, namely Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen, which also happen to be extremely rare crosslinguistically. I know of no languages outside of the Indo-European language family that exhibit the Acc-Gen pattern, and Dat-Gen exists, outside of Indo-European, only in Kartvelian and Basque, which are, of course, areally adjacent to the Indo-European languages.

Table 7: Sanskrit (preliminary) Nom Acc Dat Gen Nom Acc Dat Gen Nom-Acc Acc-Nom Dat-Nom Gen-Nom Nom-Dat Nom-Gen …

The dotted lines at the bottom of the nominative column indicate that the list may not be exhaustive.


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The question that now arises is whether the case frames that are lacking in Sanskrit have been lost in that language, or whether the additional case frames found in Germanic, Latin and Ancient Greek have arisen in these languages. Let us explore both options.

It is entirely unproblematic to assume that the additional case frames have been lost in Sanskrit, as these two case frames, Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen, are relatively low in type frequency in Germanic, Latin and Ancient Greek anyway. If these case patterns were unproductive then it is quite natural that they disappear, given a gradual renewal of the predicates of the language, and assuming that only the productive patterns attract new predicates, while the nonproductive patterns do not. That means that as soon as the predicates instantiating the nonproductive case patterns fall into disuse, the case patterns also disappear. That is all what is needed to account for the lack of case frames in Sanskrit, as compared to Germanic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Here it might be added that the Dat-Gen case frame has disappeared from all the Modern Germanic languages, while it is documented in both Old Norse-Icelandic and Old High German. The Acc-Gen case frame has disappeared from German, while only a handful of Acc-Gen predicates still exist in Modern Icelandic.

However, the opposite development is also possible, namely that the additional case frames, Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen, have emerged in Germanic, Latin and Ancient Greek. At first sight, such an analysis appears as quite difficult to explain, given the rarity of the Acc-Gen and the Dat-Gen case frames crosslinguistically, and given the lack of data documenting their birth in the Indo-European languages. Generally, the source and origin of these constructions is unknown. To throw light on the issue, consider the following examples from Old Norse-Icelandic which show a systematic alternation between a transitive and a corresponding intransitive: Old Norse-Icelandic (9) a. þeir reiddu hann … Transitive

they.NOM carried him.ACC ‘they carried him …’ (Ljósv. 23126)

(9) b. örkina reiddi um haf Intransitive

ark.the.ACC carried of ocean ‘the ark got carried over the ocean’ (Pr. 704)

Notice that the subject of the intransitive alternant of reiða ‘carry’ in (9b) maintains the case marking of the object of the transitive, i.e. the accusative. In cases like these, one of the alternants is generally considered to be derived from the other and the direction of the derivation is usually evident from the morphology of the verb. That is, the derived variant typically exhibits extra morphology on the verb, either causative morphology on the transitive or anticausative morphology on the intransitive. In cases like (9) above, no such morphological marking on the verb is found, as both forms are in the unmarked active voice.

However, lack of morphology on the head, does not necessarily mean that there is no morphology involved to shed light on the derivational history of the two alternants. It is well known that languages can be head-marked or dependent-marked, and the dependents in this case are the subject and object arguments. It is also possible that we are dealing with true ambitransitive pairs where no marking is found on either alternant, i.e. a pair where no derivational history is discernable. If so, we would be expecting nominative case on the subject of the intransitive. The fact that we do not get a nominative in (9b) but accusative, shows that the pair in (9) is not an ambitransitive pair, but a pair where the derivational marking is found on the dependents, in this case suggesting that the intransitive is derived from the transitive.

Consider now some further examples of valency reduction from the history of Icelandic, this time ditransitive and transitive pairs:


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Old Norse-Icelandic (10) a. vildum við gefa þér fé til Ditransitive

wanted we.NOM give you.DAT money.ACC towards ‘we wanted to give you money’ (Njáls saga, Ch. 49)

(10) b. Ok er þeim gaf byr Transitive and when they.DAT received wind.ACC ‘And when they received wind’ (Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu, Ch. 5)

In the ditransitive alternant in (10a) the two objects are marked dative and accusative, respectively. In the transitive alternant in (10b) the nominative agent of the ditransitive is not a part of the event structure, and hence it is not a part of the argument structure either. Instead, the dative argument takes on the behavioral properties of subjects and the accusative continues to behave as an object. If we compare the meaning of the two sentences, we see that gefa means ‘give’ in the ditransitive alternant, but ‘receive’ in the transitive one. Consider now another set of examples, also from Old Norse-Icelandic, this time with a different case frame, namely Acc-Gen (see also Ottósson 2013 for a discussion of these pairs in Old Norse-Icelandic): Old Norse-Icelandic (11) a. fysta ek þik fararinnar. Ditransitive

spurred I.NOM you.ACC trip.the.GEN ‘I urged you on the trip’ (Egils saga, Ch 49)

(11) b. fýsti Ólaf þess að ... Transitive

yearn.for Ólafur.ACC it.GEN to ‘Ólafur yearned (for it) to ...’ (Ólafs saga Tryggvasonar, Ch. 31)

The example in (11a) is a ditransitive where the subject selects for a nominative, the indirect object for an accusative and the direct object for a genitive. In the transitive alternant in (11b) the nominative subject from the ditransitive is not a part of the event structure, nor the argument structure. Instead, it is the accusative argument that behaves syntactically as a subject and the genitive continues to behave as an object. Again, there is no derivational morphology on the verb, only on the dependants. The verb fýsa means ‘urge’ in the ditransitive but ‘yearn for’ or ‘want’ in the transitive.

The semantic relation between the two verbs is equally systematic in both cases discussed above, although it may appear as less opaque in (11). In (10) when the subject referent gives something to the indirect object referent, the indirect object referent receives it. In the same way, when the subject referent of (11a) urges the indirect object referent to take on a trip, the indirect object referent becomes willing to take on a trip. The distance between ‘be willing to’ and ‘yearn for’ is a difference is in degree and not a difference in kind.

The two examples above are both from Old Norse-Icelandic, and both involve a reduction in valency from ditransitive to transitive. Old Norse-Icelandic has five different case frames for ditransitives (Barðdal, Kristoffersen & Steen 2011), given in Table 8. The more observant reader might now have noticed that the two case frames from Tables 1–3 that are not common crosslinguistically, Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen, are among the object case patterns of ditransitives in Germanic (highlighted in Table 8). This may suggest that oblique transitives in the Indo-European languages are in fact derived from transitive patterns through valency reduction. At least, such an assumption would explain the odd and crosslinguistically rare composition of the case frames.


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Table 8: Ditransitive Case Frames in Old Norse-Icelandic

Ditransitive Case Frames Nom-Dat-Acc Nom-Dat-Dat Nom-Dat-Gen Nom-Acc-Gen Nom-Acc-Dat

Since the work described here is very much work in progress, the next step in the investigation would be to inquire into Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen predicates in Latin and Ancient Greek to inspect whether the relevant oblique transitives also occur as ditransitives during the earliest stages of these languages, or in later documented stages, in case an early documentation is lacking. It is also important to study the semantics of the relevant Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen predicates in these languages to investigate whether it is semantically plausible that these predicates might have developed from ditransitives.

A further step in this investigation is to document the case frames found in the remaining early IE languages, especially the other Eastern Indo-European Languages, like Hittite and Tocharian. A preliminary investigation of Hittite reveals that all the inverse patterns, Acc-Nom, Dat-Nom and Gen-Nom are found in that language. And in addition, there is an Acc-Acc pattern in Hittite and Dat/Loc-Dat/Loc pattern. A preliminary overview is found in Table 9.

Table 9: Hittite (preliminary) Nom Acc Dat Gen Nom Acc Dat/Loc (Gen) Nom-Acc Acc-Nom Dat/Loc-Nom Gen-Nom (Nom-Dat/Loc) Acc-Acc Dat/Loc-Dat/Loc (Nom-Gen) …

An interesting feature of Table 9 is that the Acc-Acc case frame is documented in Hittite. Whether this case frame is cognate with the Icelandic Acc-Acc case frame is difficult to establish at this time, but what seems to be clear is that the Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen case patterns are not found. This may suggest that these case frames have not disappeared from Sanskrit but have rather emerged in Germanic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Such a conclusion is also in line with Luraghi’s (2012) claims that the Western Indo-European languages are detransitivizing while the Eastern Indo-European languages show exactly the opposite behavior. Examples of reduction in valency, resulting in oblique transitives and intransitives, are not confined to Icelandic. Consider the following examples from Latin: Latin (12) a. nisi memoria me fallit Transitive if.not memory.NOM me.ACC deceives ‘If memory does not deceive me’ (Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 20,1,14)


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(12) b. quod me non fefellit Intransitive as.far.as.this I.ACC not deceives/is.in.error

‘I was not (I did not happen to be) wrong as far as this is concerned’ (Cicero, In Verrem, 2,1,19)

Here fallere ‘deceive’ occurs both as a transitive verb with a Nom-Acc case frame and also as an intransitive with Acc-only case frame. Another historical example comes from Russian. The oblique transitive example in (13) is from Old Russian, while the ditransitive example is from Modern Russian: Old Russian (13) a. a molodomu česti dobytь Transitive and young.DAT honour.GEN gets

‘and the young one gets honor’ (Slovo o Zadonschine) Modern Russian (13) b. oni dobyli sebe pischu Ditransitive they.NOM got self.DAT food.ACC ‘they got food for themselves’ In the example from Old Russian, the verb dobytvatь ‘get’ selects for two arguments, a dative receiver and a genitive theme. It is difficult to know whether the genitive here is partitive genitive or not, as in Modern Russian dobytvatь occurs as a ditransitive verb, with a dative indirect object and an accusative direct object. Irrespective of whether the genitive is a partitive genitive or whether there has been a change from genitive to accusative in the history of Russian with this verb, it appears as motivated to assume that the oblique intransitive has at some point in the history of Russian been in a systematic alternation with a corresponding ditransitive. By the same token is it motivated to assume that the case marking of the transitive alternant mirrors the case marking of the indirect and direct objects of the ditransitive alternant of dobytvatь. Consider now the following examples from the modern Slavic and Baltic languages: Modern Russian (14) a. My unesli lodku na sklad.’ Transitive

we.NOM carried boat.ACC to storage.ACC ‘We carried a boat to the warehouse.’

(14) b. Lodku uneslo vniz po tečeniju. Intransitive boat.ACC carried.away down on stream ‘The boat drifted down the stream.’ Modern Lithuanian (15) a. Sanitarai prinešė pilną trobą sužeistųjų. Transitive

orderlies.NOM brought full.ACC cottage.ACC injured.GEN.PL ‘The orderlies filled the cottage with injured (people).’

(15) b. Sodą prinešė sniego. Intransitive garden.ACC brought snow.GEN ‘The garden got filled with snow.’


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In the Modern Russian example the verb nesti ‘carry’ can both occur as a transitive selecting for Nom-Acc (14a) and an intransitive with the case marking of the object maintained (Acc-only). In Modern Lithuanian prinešti ‘bring’ both exists as a ditransitive with Nom-Acc-Gen and as a transitive with Acc-Gen.

Consider, finally, the Icelandic and German examples in (16) below, which show that the transitive treiben and drífa, cognates both meaning ‘drive’, occur with an accusative subject-like argument in equivalent constructions in the two languages:

Modern Icelandic (16) a. Bátinn dreif af stefnunni, nær og nær landi. boat.the.ACC drove off direction closer and closer land ‘The boat drifted off its direction, closer and closer to land.’

(Fálkinn 1964, issue 19: 29) Bavarian German (16) b. Es trieb den Kahn an den Strand.

it drove the.ACC boat to the beach ‘The boat drifted to the beach.’ (Kainhofer 2002)

The example in (16b) is an old-fashioned example from Bavarian German, according to Kainhofer (2002). One difference between the two languages is that there is an expletive es in first position in the German example, which is not found in the Icelandic example. This is a secondary development in German which has targeted several different kind of constructions and predicates throughout the history of German (cf. Lenertz 1977). To summarize the content of this section, it seems more plausible, given the current documentation of case frames in Hittite and Sanskrit, that the case patterns Acc-Gen and Dat-Gen have emerged through a reduction in valency from ditransitives to oblique transitives in the Western Indo-European languages. In other words, they are presumably not inherited from Proto-Indo-European, and lost in the Eastern Indo-European languages. Given our present knowledge, this seems to be the most likely trajectory of the change, and hence its most likely directionality. I now go on to show how an actual reconstruction of the data presented here may be carried out, and how one particular language change may be modeled, this time employing the formalism of Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2005). 5.2 Modeling the Change On traditional structural and generative accounts of grammar, the alternation between Nom-Acc-Gen and Acc-Gen, on the one hand, and Nom-Acc and Acc-only, on the other, would be conceptualized as a rule deriving one form from the other, most likely the transitive from the ditransitive and the intransitive from the transitive. Therefore, on a structural and generative account, what needs to be reconstructed is a rule deriving one from the other. Such an enterprise presupposes, of course, that there is a collective grammar that can be modeled, irrespective of idiolects and the grammars of individuals. I refer the reader to Lightfoot (1979, 2002, 2006, inter alia) on the impracticalities of reconstructing rules, although Lightfoot’s problems with syntactic reconstruction are more of conceptual nature than practical (cf. Section 2 above).

Instead of reconstructing a rule, it is in fact possible to reconstruct the relation between the data discussed in the previous subsection in terms of a systematic alternation between two argument structure constructions. In such a case, one needs to reconstruct the two constructions, and identify the conditions for the use of each construction and integrate these


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into the analysis. Sandal, in a study from 2011 on the accusative in Old Norse-Icelandic, identifies such conditions. She argues, following Haspelmath (1987) and others, that the intransitive Acc-only variant denotes an event that has occurred spontaneously, with no causer, while transitive Nom-Acc case frames are causatives with the agent subject functioning as the causer. This can be modeled as in Figure 5 (based on Sandal 2011: 82, who adopts the formalism of Goldberg 1995).

Figure 5: The Causative–Anticausative Relation between Nom-Acc and Acc-only

Sem CAUSED MOTION

< agent Patient >

drífa … <Mover Moved >

Syn V SUBJ.NOM OBJ.ACC

Ia: Anticausativization

Sem MOTION < Patient >

drífa … [–specific cause] [+spontaneous]

< Moved >

Syn V SUBJ.ACC

The upper box in Figure 5 represents the causative Nom-Acc alternant. The Sem field specifies that this a caused motion construction with an agent and a patient. The Syn field shows that the agent is mapped onto the subject function and the patient onto the object function. The middle field gives the lexical verb, drífa ‘drive’, and lists the verb-specific participant roles, in this case a mover and a moved item. The lower box in Figure 5 represents the anticausative alternant where the agent subject is neither a part of the event structure nor the argument structure. The verb is the same, drífa now meaning ‘drift’, as there is no specific cause or causer present. As a consequence, the event is perceived of as being spontaneous, something which must be specified as a feature of this construction, here given in the middle field of the lower box. The two constructions, the causative and the anticausative one, are here defined as standing in a systematic relation to each other, namely the intransitive one is an anticausative variant of the transitive one. This is captured in Figure 5 through the inheritance link between them, here labeled Ia where I stands for Inheritance and a for Anticausative. In that sense,


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anticausative inheritance links are on par with other types of links that Goldberg posits, such as instance/taxonomy links, subpart links, polysemy links and metaphorical links. Since constructions have multiple inheritance, the Anticausative Acc-only is also an instance of the ordinary intransitive constructions, which means that it inherits properties from that construction as well as from the causative Nom-Acc construction. The intransitive construction, in turn, consists of several subconstructions, namely Nom-only, Acc-only, Dat-only and Gen-only, as shown in the first row in Table 4 above (cf. also Barðdal 2009). The model in Figure 5 above would then represent an earlier stage of the Germanic languages, given a reconstruction based on Old Norse-Icelandic and Bavarian German. In Modern Icelandic, however, and already to some degree in Old Norse-Icelandic, Sandal argues, the alternation between the causative Nom-Acc and the anticausative Acc-only is not productive anymore. The change from Proto-Germanic to Modern Icelandic can therefore be captured by assuming a development from the situation in Figure 5, where a systematic alternation is given, to a situation as in Figure 6, where no alternation is posited:

Figure 6: No Relation between the Causative and its Derivational Anticausative

Sem CAUSED MOTION

< agent Patient >

drífa … <Mover Moved >

Syn V SUBJ.NOM OBJ.ACC

Sem MOTION < Patient >

drífa … [–specific cause] [+spontaneous]

< Moved >

Syn V SUBJ.ACC

Figure 6 differs from Figure 5 in that no link between the two constructions is posited, hence no systematic relation is assumed to exist between the two constructions. Instead, one is an instance of the transitive construction and the other an instance of the intransitive construction (not shown in Figures 5 and 6). The change from Proto-Germanic to Modern Icelandic can thus easily be modeled through a simple disappearance of a link from the grammar. This concludes the current presentation of an ongoing case study on the emergence of new case frames in the Indo-European languages.


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6. Summary The Comparative Method was originally developed to reconstruct phonology, morphology and the lexicon, while syntactic reconstruction lagged behind. This may in part have been because of the Neogrammarians’ and the early structuralists’ lack of interest in syntax, but in part the reason was the current view at the time that syntactic structures are not form–meaning correspondences, and that the meaning of a sentence is simply the sum of the meaning of the lexical parts. Several other arguments against syntactic reconstruction have been brought forward in the literature, including lack of cognates, lack of arbitrariness, lack of directionality in syntactic change, and lack of continuous transmission from one generation to the other. All these arguments against the feasibility of syntactic reconstruction can be met with not only counterarguments, but also with existing research results running counter to these claims. Of major relevance for syntactic reconstruction are theories of language change, which may grossly be divided into three different types, i.e. a) child-based theories of language change, b) variation-based sociolinguistic theories of language change, and c) utterance-based theories of language change. All three types are somewhat inadequate for instance with regard to changes in argument structure and case marking, although some clear tendencies may be found in the development of case markers, case patterns and argument structure. A resurgence of optimism with regard to the feasibility of doing syntactic reconstruction has sprung up during recent times. More and more scholars, of different theoretical persuasions, have started arguing for, and carrying out, syntactic reconstruction. Such a reconstruction must abide to certain procedural requirements, of which the first one is to identify the cognates, the next is to set up correspondence sets, and the third is to model the reconstructed material with adequate formal tools. In addition, different layers of historical data must be identified and peeled away, opposing hypotheses must be evaluated against each other, and an analysis consistent with the preserved data and the language system at large must be chosen over other less likely hypotheses. As an example of syntactic reconstruction, I have presented data from an ongoing study on the emergence of new case patterns in the Indo-European languages. The data from the daughters are not identical, with Sanskrit showing an impoverished pattern, compared to Germanic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Two scenarios are possible: First, the extra case patterns found in the Western Indo-European language area might have disappeared from Sanskrit. The second scenario is that the extra case patterns have arisen only in the Western Indo-European language area, and, hence, that these case patterns are not a Proto-Indo-European inheritance. Preliminary data from Hittite support the latter scenario. Therefore, the new case patterns are hypothesized to have arisen through a valency reduction, a detransitivization process, deriving anticausatives from causatives, resulting in three-place predicates occurring as two-place predicates, and two-place predicates occurring as one-place predicates. This analysis is supported by the fact that the subject of the derived anticausative construction maintains the case marking of the object of its causative counterpart. Gradually, the link between the causative and its anticausative alternant has faded, rendering the oblique anticausative as a construction independent of its causative counterpart in the synchronic grammar of speakers. The analysis is couched in the formalism of Cognitive Construction Grammar. References Abbott-Smith, Kirsten & Michael Tomasello. 2006. Exemplar-Learning and Schematization

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