Bubenik Vit, Hewson John, Rose Sarah (eds.) Grammatical Change in Indo-European Languages

John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009. — 289 p. — (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 305). — ISBN 9027248214, 9789027248213.Papers presented at the workshop on Indo-European Linguistics at the XVIIIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Montreal, 2007.The product of a group of scholars who have been working on new directions in Historical Linguistics, this book is focused on questions of grammatical change, and the central issue of grammaticalization in Indo-European languages. Several studies examine particular problems in specific languages, but often with implications for the IE phylum as a whole. Given the historical scope of the data (over a period of four millennia) long range grammatical changes such as the development of gender differences, strategies of definiteness, the prepositional phrase, or of the syntax of the verbal diathesis and aspect, are also treated. The shifting relevance of morphology to syntax, and syntax to morphology, a central motif of this research, has provoked lively debate in the discipline of Historical Linguistics.Gender, animacy and number
The origin of the feminine gender in PIE: An old problem in a new perspective. Silvia Luraghi
The animacy fallacy: Cognitive categories and noun classification. Maria M. Manoliu
Default, animacy, avoidance: Diachronic and synchronic agreement variations with mixed-gender antecedents. Hans Henrich Hock
The early development of animacy in Novgorod: Evoking the vocative anew. Kyongjoon Kwon
The development of mass/count distinctions in Indo-European varieties. Inés Fernández-Ordóñez
Definiteness, case and prepostions
Strategies of definiteness in Latin: Implications for early Indo-European. Brigitte L.M. Bauer
The rise and development of the possessive construction in Middle Iranian with parallels in Albanian. Vit Bubenik
Does Homeric Greek have prepositions? Or local adverbs? (And what's the difference anyway?). Dag T.T. Haug
Tense/aspect and diathesis
On the origin of the Slavic aspects: Questions of chronology. Henning Andersen
The *-to-/-no- construction of Indo-European: Verbal adjective or past passive participle? Bridget Drinka
Grammaticalization of the verbal diathesis in Germanic. John Hewson
The origin and meaning of the first person singular consonantal markers of the Hittite hi/mi conjugations. Sarah Rose
Morphosyntax
The origin of the oblique-subject construction: An Indo-European comparison. Jóhanna Barðdal and Thórhallur Eythórsson
Morphosyntactic changes in Persian and their effects on syntax. Azam Estaji
Possessive subjects, nominalization and ergativity in North Russian. Hakyung Jung
On the grammaticalization of *kw i-/kw o- relative clauses in Proto-Indo-European. Eugenio R. Luján
Reconstruction of inflectional categories in Indo-European
Formal correspondences, different functions: On the reconstruction of inflectional categories of Indo-European. José Luis Garcia-Ramon