Friday seminar, January 27,
14.15 – 16.00, Room: HF-217
“Hungering and Lusting for Women and Fleshly Delicacies”:
Reconstructing Grammatical Relations for Proto-Germanic
Syntactic reconstruction has virtually been outlawed in historical-comparative research for a long time, more or less ever since Watkins (1964, 1976) influential work on the problems of reconstructing word order for Proto-Indo-European. Recently, through the emergence of Construction Grammar, where complex syntactic structures are regarded as form-function pairings, a resurgence of syntactic reconstruction is made possible, as complex syntactic structures become a legitimate object of the Comparative Method. Given the legitimacy of syntactic reconstruction, and hence the possible reconstruction of argument structure constructions (Barðdal & Eythórsson 2011, Eythórsson & Barðdal 2011, Barðdal 2012), a major question arises as to whether also grammatical relations are reconstructable for earlier undocumented language periods. We argue that if the constructions singling out grammatical relations can be reconstructed for a proto-branch, the grammatical relations following from these are also reconstructable for that proto-branch. In order to illustrate our methodology, we show how a reconstruction of the subject function in Proto-Germanic may be carried out, more specifically of oblique subjects predicates like ‘hunger’, ‘thirst’, ‘lust’ and others, based on the subject properties found in the earliest Germanic daughter languages.
References:
Barðdal, Jóhanna & Thórhallur Eythórsson. 2011. Reconstructing Syntax: Construction Grammar and the Comparative Method. To appear in Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Eds. H. C. Boas & I. A. Sag. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2012. Construction-Based Historical-Comparative Reconstruction. To appear in Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Eds. Graeme Trousdale and Thomas Hoffmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eythórsson, Thórhallur & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2005. Oblique Subjects: A Common Germanic Inheritance. Language 81(4): 824–881.
Watkins, Calvert. 1964. Preliminaries to the reconstruction of Indo-European sentence structure. In Proceedings of the IX International Congress of Linguists, ed. H. G. Lunt, 1035–1045. The Hague: Mouton.
Watkins, Calvert. 1976. Toward Proto-Indo-European syntax: Problems and pseudoproblems. In Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society: Papers from the parasession on diachronic syntax, 305–326. Eds. S. B. Steever, C. A. Walker and S. S. Mufwene. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.