Book

The rise and fall of ergativity in Aramaic : cycles of alignment change

Coghill, Eleanor, author

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Subject: Aramaic language Ergative constructions.
• ISBN: 9780198723806, 0198723806

Item info:

1 item available

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Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
PJ5201.C64 2016	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE