Full Description
Semantic roles have continued to intrigue linguists for more than four decades now, starting with determining their kind and number, with their morphological expression, and with their interaction with argument structure and syntax. The focus in this volume is on typological and historical issues. The papers focus on the cross-linguistic identification of semantic-role equivalents, on the regularity of, and exceptions concerning change and grammaticalization in semantic roles, the variation of encoding the roles of direction and experiencer in specific languages, presenting evidence for identifying a new semantic role of speech addressee in Caucasian languages, on semantic roles in word formation, and finally a cross-linguistic comparison of the functions and the grammaticalization of the ethical dative in some Indo-European languages. The book will be of interest to anyone involved with case and semantic roles, with the syntax-semantics interface, and with semantic change and grammaticalization.
Contents
1. Perspectives on semantic roles: An introduction (by Luraghi, Silvia); 2. Inducing semantic roles (by Cysouw, Michael); 3. The grammaticalization chain of case functions: Extension and reanalysis of case marking vs. universals of grammaticalization (by Narrog, Heiko); 4. Plotting diachronic semantic maps: The role of metaphors (by Luraghi, Silvia); 5. The (non-)prototypicality of Direction: The (allative and illative) case(s) of Finnish (by Kittila, Seppo); 6. The Morphosyntax of the Experiencer in Early Vedic (by Dahl, Eystein); 7. Against the addressee of speech - Recipient metaphor: Evidence from East Caucasian (by Daniel, Michael A.); 8. Semantic roles and word formation: Instrument and Location in Ancient Greek (by Lujan, Eugenio R.); 9. From semantic roles to evaluative markers. The dative and affected possessors: A constructional comparison between German, Italian and French (by Niclot, Domenico); 10. Author index; 11. Language index; 12. Subject index
