The Diachronic Typology of Non-Canonical Subjects (Studies in Language Companion Series)

This volume is an important contribution to the diachrony of non-canonical subjects in a typological perspective. The questions addressed concern the internal mechanisms and triggers for various changes that non-canonical subjects undergo, ranging from semantic motivations to purely structural explanations. The discussion encompasses the whole life-cycle of non-canonical subjects: from their emergence out of non-subject arguments to their expansion, demise or canonicization, focusing primarily on syntactic changes and changes in case-marking. The volume offers a number of different case studies comprising such languages as Italian, Spanish, Old Norse and Russian as well as languages less studied in this context, such as Latin, Classical Armenian, Baltic languages and some East Caucasian languages. Typological generalizations in the form of recurrent developmental paths are offered on the basis of data presented in this volume and in the literature. Ilja A. Seržant, Chiara Fedriani & Leonid Kulikov: Introduction Part I: Rise of non-canonical subjects or subject-like obliques Olga Fernández-Soriano & Amaya Mendikoetxea: Non selected dative arguments in Spanish anticausative constrructions. Exploring subjecthood Helen de Hoop: The rise of animacy-based differential subject marking in Dutch Hakyung Jung: The Rise of Oblique Subjects in Russian Daniel Kölligan: Non-canonical subject marking. Genitive subjects in Classical Armenian Annie Montaut: The rise of non-canonical subjects and semantic alignments in Hindi Part II: Historical changes in constructions with non-canonical subjects or subject-like obliques Marina Benedetti: Experiencers and psychological noun predicates. From Latin to Italian Liina Lindström: Between Finnic and Indo-European. Variation and change in the Estonian experiencer-object construction Chantal Melis & Marcela Flores: On the historical expansion of non-canonically marked ‘subjects’ in Spanish Part III: From non-canonical subjects or subject-like obliques to canonical subjects Jan Terje Faarlund: Subjects in Scandinavian Chiara Fedriani: The me pudet construction in the history of Latin; why and how fast non-canonical subjects come and go Dmitry Ganenkov: Diachrony of experiencer subject marking. Evidence from East Caucasian Axel Holvoet: Obliqueness, quasi-subjects and transitivity in Baltic and Slavonic Ilja A. Seržant: Rise of canonical subjecthood Synthesis Ilja A. Seržant: The diachronic typology of non-canonical subjects and subject-like obliques In this paper I have examined several instances in which an oblique constituent acquires canonical subject marking, i.e. nominative case and verbal agreement (in an accusative language). These instances show that an oblique constituent may acquire subject coding properties without being beforehand endowed with subject behavioural properties, if two requirements are met: (i) this oblique constituent must exhibit a considerable functional overlap with the prototypical subject in the given language and, (ii) there must be either no canonically case-marked subject in the construction at all, or the coding subject properties must be assigned to a constituent that has less functional-semantic overlap with the prototypical subject than the oblique constituent. Furthermore, I claim that there is often some minor semantic change concomitant with the acquisition of subject coding properties. I have also introduced the control over the pre-stage property (CoP) which is a weaker entailment than Dowty's (1991) volitional involvement in event or state. It only denotes whether or not the experiencer had the choice to resist the experience to come about. Differently from Dowty's (1991) approach, which presupposes that the proto-role entailments are lexical and provided primarily by the predicate, it is assumed that some of the proto-role entailments may also stem from the case frame. This becomes especially obvious with the labile predicates that allow for more than one case frame, each resulting in different sets of the proto-role entailments Contributes to the diachrony of non-canonical subjects in a typological perspective. In this volume, the questions addressed concern the internal mechanisms and triggers for various changes that non-canonical subjects undergo, ranging from semantic motivations to purely structural explanations.