Chapter 7. The diachrony of non-canonical subjects in Northwest Semitic

Pat-El, Na’ama

doi:10.1075/slcs.200.07pat

Cited by 24 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 22 publications

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“…To give examples of modern languages which exhibit structures where the nonnominative argument shows uncontroversial subject behavior, we may mention Icelandic (Thráinsson 1979; inter alia), Faroese (Barnes 1986); Russian (Moore & Perlmutter 2000); Japanese (Shibatani 1999), Korean (Yoon 2004), Hebrew (Landau 2009;Pat-El 2018), and Romanian (Ilioaia 2021;Ilioaia & Van Peteghem 2021), not to mention language families like the Quechuan languages (Hermon 1985), the Dravidian languages (Verma & Mohanan 1990), the Dardic languages (Steever 1998), the Tibeto-Burman languages (Bickel 2004) and Cariban languages (de Castro Alves 2018).…”

Section: Earlier Research On Subjecthoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-nominative subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek

Barðdal,

Cattafi,

Danesi

et al. 2023

Indogermanische Forschungen

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This article responds to a call for research, made by Hock (1990) more than 30 years ago, on the subject behavior of potential non-nominative subjects in the early Indo-European languages. Hock's call was made in the wake of research into behavioral properties of non-nominative subjects in several modern languages. Since then, comprehensive studies have been carried out on the subject behavior of non-nominative subjects in the early Germanic languages, including Gothic, Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Norse-Icelandic, etc. Some preliminary work has been undertaken on Latin, while work on Ancient Greek is almost non-existent. We gather the Latin data provided so far, adding complementary evidence; we also present a complete dataset from Ancient Greek not figuring in the earlier literature. These data, pertaining to six established subject tests, show that potential non-nominative subjects behave syntactically as nominative subjects in both Latin and Ancient Greek, while an analysis in terms of object is excluded.

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Section: Earlier Research On Subjecthoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-nominative subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek

Barðdal,

Cattafi,

Danesi

et al. 2023

Indogermanische Forschungen

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It’s all about the sentential construction

Becker

2022

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Cross-linguistically, very few complete sentences, as opposed to a myriad of phrases, lexicalize to become words. I here offer an account for this skewed distribution, along the lines of Construction Grammar, by analyzing a set of mono-clausal sentences in Hebrew which have indeed become – or are on the verge of becoming – words. I adopt the distinction between categorical and thetic propositions, and show that only the latter can evolve into words. A thetic – unlike a categorical – proposition, much like a verb-phrase, enables a tight semantic bonding between its components to form an ‘interpretatively cohesive’ unit, which may lead to semantic change. An evaluative thetic – unlike a categorical – proposition is comment-like, hence ‘semantically-incomplete’, and in need of a topic from prior discourse to predicate on, which may lead to a change in grammatical status. All verb-phrases meet these two criteria but only few sentences do, hence, I argue, the skewed distribution of sources from which new words evolve.

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Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo-Aramaic

Khan¹,

Noorlander²

2021

Semitic Languages and Cultures

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The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.

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Chapter 7. The diachrony of non-canonical subjects in Northwest Semitic

Cited by 24 publications

References 22 publications

Non-nominative subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek

Non-nominative subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek

It’s all about the sentential construction

Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo-Aramaic

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