Full Description
This volume is an important contribution to the diachrony of non-canonical subjects in a typological perspective. The questions addressed concern the internal mechanisms and triggers for various changes that non-canonical subjects undergo, ranging from semantic motivations to purely structural explanations. The discussion encompasses the whole life-cycle of non-canonical subjects: from their emergence out of non-subject arguments to their expansion, demise or canonicization, focusing primarily on syntactic changes and changes in case-marking. The volume offers a number of different case studies comprising such languages as Italian, Spanish, Old Norse and Russian as well as languages less studied in this context, such as Latin, Classical Armenian, Baltic languages and some East Caucasian languages. Typological generalizations in the form of recurrent developmental paths are offered on the basis of data presented in this volume and in the literature.
Contents
1. List of contributors; 2. Introduction (by Serzant, Ilja A.); 3. Part I. Rise of non-canonical subjects or subject-like obliques; 4. Non selected dative arguments in Spanish anticausative constructions: Exploring subjecthood (by Fernandez-Soriano, Olga); 5. The rise of animacy-based differential subject marking in Dutch (by Hoop, Helen de); 6. The rise of oblique subjects in Russian (by Jung, Hakyung); 7. Non-canonical subject marking: Genitive subjects in Classical Armenian (by Kolligan, Daniel); 8. The rise of non-canonical subjects and semantic alignments in Hindi (by Montaut, Annie); 9. Part II. Historical changes in constructions with non-canonical subjects or subject-like obliques; 10. Experiencers and psychological noun predicates: From Latin to Italian (by Benedetti, Marina); 11. Between Finnic and Indo-European: Variation and change in the Estonian experiencer-object construction (by Lindstrom, Liina); 12. On the historical expansion of non-canonically marked 'subjects' in Spanish (by Melis, Chantal); 13. Part III. From non-canonical subjects or subject-like obliques to canonical subjects; 14. Subjects in Scandinavian (by Faarlund, Jan Terje); 15. The me pudet construction in the history of Latin: why and how fast non-canonical subjects come and go (by Fedriani, Chiara); 16. Diachrony of experiencer subject marking: Evidence from East Caucasian (by Ganenkov, Dmitry); 17. Obliqueness, quasi-subjects and transitivity in Baltic and Slavonic (by Holvoet, Axel); 18. Rise of canonical subjecthood (by Serzant, Ilja A.); 19. Synthesis; 20. The diachronic typology of non-canonical subjects and subject-like obliques (by Serzant, Ilja A.); 21. Language index; 22. Subject index
