Syntactic reconstruction in Indo-European : the state of the art

Interest in syntactic reconstruction was implicit in the work of the founding fathers of the Comparative Method, including Franz Bopp and his contemporaries. The Neo-Grammarians took a more active interest in syntactic issues, concentrating especially on comparative descriptive syntax. In the 20th century, typologically-inspired research gave rise to several reconstructions of neutral word order for Proto-Indo-European. This work was met with severe criticism by Watkins (1976), which had the unfortunate effect that work on syntactic reconstruction reached a methodological impasse and was largely abandoned. However, the pioneering work of Hale (1987a), Garrett (1990) and Harris & Campbell (1995) showed that syntactic reconstruction could be carried out successfully. Currently, three different strands of work on syntactic reconstruction can be identified: i) the traditional Indo-Europeanists, ii) the generativists, and iii) the construction grammarians. The reconstructions of the two first strands are incomplete, either due to lack of formal representation, or due to the inability of the representational system to explicate the details of the form-meaning correspondences underlying any analysis of syntactic reconstruction. In contrast, Construction Grammar has at its disposal a full-fledged representational formalism where all aspects of grammar can be made explicit, hence allowing for the precise formulations of form-meaning correspondences needed to carry out a complete reconstruction. This is exemplified in the present paper with a reconstruction of grammatical relations for Proto-Germanic, involving a set of argument structure constructions and the subject tests applicable in the grammar of the proto-stage

The change that never happened : the story of oblique subjects

This paper contributes to an ongoing debate on the syntactic status of oblique subject-like NPs in the ‘impersonal’ construction (of the type me-thinks) in Old Germanic. The debate is caused by the lack of canonical subject case marking in such NPs. It has been argued that these NPs are syntactic objects, but we provide evidence for their subject status, as in Modern Icelandic and Faroese. Thus, we argue that the syntactic status of the oblique subject-like NPs has not changed at all from object status to subject status, contra standard claims in the literature. Our evidence stems from Old Icelandic, but the analysis has implications for the other old Germanic languages as well. However, a change from non-canonical to canonical subject case marking (‘Nominative Sickness’) has affected all the Germanic languages to a varying degree

The passive of reflexive verbs in Icelandic

The Reflexive Passive in Icelandic is reminiscent of the so-called New Passive (or New Impersonal) in that the oblique case of a passivized object NP is preserved. As is shown by recent surveys, however, speakers who accept the Reflexive Passive do not necessarily accept the New Passive, whereas conversely, speakers who accept the New Passive do also accept the Reflexive Passive. Based on these results we suggest that there is a hierarchy in the acceptance of passive sentences in Icelandic, termed the Passive Acceptability Hierarchy. The validity of this hierarchy is confirmed by our diachronic corpus study of open access digital library texts from Icelandic journals and newspapers dating from the 19th and 20th centuries (tímarit.is). Finally, we sketch an analysis of the Reflexive Passive, proposing that the different acceptability rates of the Reflexive and New Passives lie in the argument status of the object. Simplex reflexive pronouns are semantically dependent on the verbs which select them, and should therefore be analyzed as syntactic arguments only, and not as semantic arguments of these verbs