Workshop5

Call for papers: Several of the Modern Indo-European languages that have maintained morphological case exhibit structures where the subject(-like) argument is not canonically case marked. These are found amongst the Modern Germanic languages, Modern Russian, the Modern Baltic languages and the Modern Indo-Aryan languages, to mention some. It is traditionally assumed in the literature that these have developed from objects to subjects (see, for instance, Hewson and Bubenik 2006), hence the case marking. Recently, however, it has been argued for Germanic that oblique subjects in the modern languages were syntactic subjects already in Old Germanic (Eythórsson and Barðdal 2005). This raises the question whether these non-canonically case-marked subject(-like) arguments were objects in Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European, or whether they may have been syntactic subjects all along, given an assumption of the alignment system in Proto-Indo-European being a Fluid-S system (cf. Barðdal and Eythórsson 2008). It is, moreover, possible that the case marking patterns of different predicate types have different origins in Indo-European. The aim of this workshop is therefore to gather researchers who work on case marking in Indo-European, and case marking in general, to a forum where the more general topic of the origin of this non-canonical case marking can be discussed. By doing that, we hope to shed light on this important issue within case marking and alignment, historical linguistics, and Indo-European studies.