Publications

Non-finite forms constitute an important component of the verbal system of Indo-Aryan (IA) languages. On the one hand, some of them, such as e.g., converbs, have already received proper attention in historical linguistics and typological literature, with regard to Old Indo-Aryan (OIA), Middle IndoAryan (MIA) and New Indo-Aryan (NIA) (cf. Tikkanen 1987; Peterson 1998; Subbarao 2012 among others). Other forms, such as participles, have usually ...

The aim of this article is to examine the directionality of change in Voice in relation to Tense/Aspect, foremost based on evidence from Greek as well as additional evidence from Early Vedic. Starting with the hypothesis that in (standard) Proto-Indo-European a number of innovations resulted in the introduction of some elements of the Perfect-Stative inflection into the Present (cf. Kulikov & Lavidas 2013), we study the directionality of ...

The goal of this article is to introduce to the field a particular subtype of valency-reducing strategies, referred to as oblique anticausativization below. This subtype differs from more common and better known dependent-marking types, such as, for instance, the canonical anticausative. Instead, oblique anticausatives are characterized by the preservation of the object case of the transitive-causative alternant, hence the term oblique. This ...

For a long time one of the most bewildering conundrums of Indo-European linguistics has been the issue of how to reconstruct the alignment system of this ancient language state, given the lack of distinction between s and o marking in the Proto-Indo-European neuter nouns and the problem of the Hittite ergative. An additional complication stems from the existence of argument structure constructions where the subject(-like) argument is marked in a ...

This article offers a descriptive account of body part constructions in Old East Frisian texts and analyzes the occurrence of dative experiencers in such clauses. This includes a comparison between Old Frisian body part grammar and its Middle Dutch counterpart, revisiting issues such as the antiquity of dative external possessors and oblique subject constructions in West Germanic. In presenting the data from a theory-neutral perspective, this ...

A long-standing divide between Icelandic and German in the literature takes for granted that there are non-nominative subjects in Icelandic, while corresponding arguments in German have been analyzed as objects (Zaenen et al. 1985; Sigurosson 1989). This is based on two differences between these languages: (a) differences with regard to control and conjunction reduction and (b) apparent subject behavior of the nominative in DAT-NOM constructions ...

The semantic range of ditransitive verbs in Modern English has been at the center of linguistic attention ever since the pioneering work of Pinker (1989. Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press). At the same time, historical research on how the semantics of the ditransitive construction has changed over time has seriously lagged behind. In order to address this issue for the Germanic ...