![]() ![]() ![]() If this reminded you of yet another instance of life riffing on The Onion or Ron Swanson, you're not alone. Rather, they provide evidence that some types of morphosyntactic change, especially those related to event and argument structure, are driven by reanalysis of the feature content of functional heads under local structural ambiguity.Earlier this week a mini food scandal erupted under the following headline: "Double Stuf Oreos Don't Actually Have Double The Creme." However, unlike in other changes usually discussed under the label "cycle", unidirectional economy principles do not apply in these cases. Both changes are the result of the simultaneous availability of a stative and an eventive reading in deverbal adjectival forms and could belong to a larger "participle cycle". While the first type of change is the result of a diachronic reanalysis by which a functional projection (VoiceP) is lost, the second type adds an active Voice head. This article discusses two case studies of diachronic "voice flipping" in which the syntax of a participle appears to change from active or "subject-oriented" to passive (Ancient Greek-menos to Modern Greek-menos) and from resultative/stative to active (Proto-Indo-European *-nt- Hittite-ant-vs. These two branches, Indo-Aryan and Greek, arguably instantiate two basic types of development: a syncretic type found in many Western branches, including Greek, and an anti-syncretic type attested in some Eastern branches, in particular in Indo-Aryan. In contrast, Indo-Aryan has chosen a different, anti-syncretic, strategy of encoding detransitivizing derivational morphology, though with the middle inflection consistently preserved in passive ya-presents. Most Indo-European languages have abandoned the use of middle forms in passive patterns, while Greek is quite conservative and regularly uses middle forms as passives. We will examine the contrast between non-specialized and specialized markers of the passive in Early Vedic and Greek. ![]() The role of the middle (and stative) in the expression of the passive in ancient IE languages raises important theoretical questions and is a testing ground for the methods of syntactic reconstruction. Apart from the suffix *-i̯(e/o)- (for which we cannot reconstruct a passive function in the proto-language) and several nominal derivatives, we do not find sufficient evidence for specialized passive morphology. In Proto-Indo-European the fundamental distinction within the verbal system is between the active and middle, while specialized markers of the passive are lacking and the passive syntactic pattern is encoded with middle inflection. This article examines various aspects of the reconstruction of the passive in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), foremost on the basis of evidence from the Indo-Aryan (Early Vedic) and Greek branches. Our results confirmed Ottósson's (2013) view that the noncausal domain was systematized at a later stage than the causal one. Most remarkably, we showed that: (i) in respect to the debated issue regarding the interpretation of Gothic passives, these can be employed to express noncausal situations (ii) within the causal : noncausal alternation, whereas the causal domain is tied to ja-suffixation, the noncausal domain can be expressed by a variety of means, including na-verbs. The nature of the Gothic corpus (extension, genre, and nature of the text) influenced the results: some constructions were less frequently attested than expected genre influenced the frequency of some verbal usages some marginally attested constructions are owed to the Greek translational source. The coded group comprises the applicative, passive, causal : noncausal, reflexive, and reciprocal alternations. The uncoded group includes partitive, null object, external possessor, cognate/kindred object, applicative, (marginally) causal : non causal, and (marginally) reflexive alternations. ![]() Valency alternations are divided into uncoded and coded patterns. Our data consists of 87 verb meanings based on those in the ValPaL corpus, which we supplemented due to gaps in coverage. This paper investigates Gothic valency patterns and alternations applying the methodology of the ValPaL project. ![]()
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