Jóhanna Barðdal

Place: HF 217

        Time: Friday January 27., 14.15-16.00

 

Title: "Hungering and Lusting for Women and Fleshly Delicacies": Reconstructing Grammatical Relations in Proto-Germanic

Syntactic reconstruction has virtually been outlawed in historical-comparative research for a long time, more or less ever since Watkins (1964, 1976) influential work on the problems of reconstructing word order for Proto-Indo-European. Recently, through the emergence of Construction Grammar, where complex syntactic structures are regarded as form-function pairings, a resurgence of syntactic reconstruction is made possible, as complex syntactic structures become a legitimate object of the Comparative Method. Given the legitimacy of syntactic reconstruction, and hence the possible reconstruction of argument structure constructions (Barðdal & Eythórsson 2011, Eythórsson & Barðdal 2011, Barðdal 2012), a major question arises as to whether also grammatical relations are reconstructable for earlier undocumented language periods. We argue that if the constructions singling out grammatical relations can be reconstructed for a proto-branch, the grammatical relations following from these are also reconstructable for that proto-branch. In order to illustrate our methodology, we show how a reconstruction of the subject function in Proto-Germanic may be carried out, more specifically of oblique subjects predicates like 'hunger', 'thirst', 'lust' and others, based on the subject properties found in the earliest Germanic daughter languages.