The rise and fall of ergativity in Aramaic : cycles of alignment change /
This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic texts, recent dialectal documentation, and cross-linguistic parallels to provide an account of the pathways through whic...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford ; New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
2016.
|
| Edition: | First edition. |
| Series: | Oxford linguistics.
Oxford studies in diachronic and historical linguistics ; 21. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic texts, recent dialectal documentation, and cross-linguistic parallels to provide an account of the pathways through which this alignment change took place. She argues that what became the ergative construction was originally limited mostly to verbs with an experiencer role, such as 'see' and 'hear', which could encode the experiencer with a dative. While this dative-experiencer scenario shows some formal similarities with other proposed explanations for alignment change, the data analysed in this book show that it is clearly distinct. The book draws important theoretical conclusions on the development of tense-conditioned alignment cross-linguistically, and provides a valuable basis for further research. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xxi, 381 pages) : map |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780191791147 0191791148 0191035742 9780191035746 |