EAN: 9783110195866

ALIGNMENT CHANGE IN IRANIAN LANGUAGES - GEOFFRE...

The Iranian languages  due to their exceptional time-depth of attestation  constitute one of
the very few instances where a shift from accusative alignment to split-ergativity is actually
documented. Yet remarkably  within historical syntax  the Iranian case has received only very
superficial coverage. This book provides the first in-depth treatment of alignment change in
Iranian  from Old Persian (5 C. BC) to the present. The first part of the book examines the
claim that ergativity in Middle Iranian emerged from an Old Iranian agented passive
construction. This view is rejected in favour of a theory which links the emergence of
ergativity to External Possession. Thus the primary mechanisms involved is not reanalysis  but
the extension of a pre-existing construction. The notion of Non-Canonical Subjecthood plays a
pivotal role  which in the present account is linked to the semantics of what is termed
Indirect Participation. In the second part of the book  a comparative look at contemporary West
Iranian is undertaken. It can be shown that throughout the subsequent developments in the
morphosyntax  distinct components such as agreement  nominal case marking  or the grammar of
cliticisation  in fact developed remarkably independently of one another. It was this
de-coupling of sub-systems of the morphosyntax that led to the notorious multiplicity of
alignment types in Iranian  a fact that also characterises past-tense alignments in the sister
branch of Indo-European  Indo-Aryan. Along with data from more than 20 Iranian languages 
presented in a manner that renders them accessible to the non-specialist  there is extensive
discussion of more general topics such as the adequacy of functional accounts of changes in
case systems  discourse pressure and the role of animacy  the notion of drift  and the question
of alignment in early Indo-European.

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