The rise and fall of ergativity in Aramaic : cycles of alignment change / Eleanor Coghill.

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.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

Cover ; The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic: Cycles of Alignment Change; Copyright; Dedication ; Contents; Series preface; Acknowledgements; List of maps and tables; Maps; Tables; Abbreviations and glosses; Transcription of Semitic languages; Symbols; Signs used in texts; 1: Introduction; 2: Alignment; 2.1 Alignment of verbal arguments; 2.1.1 Syntactic alignment; 2.1.2 Semantic/Split-S alignment; 2.1.3 Manifestation of alignment; 2.2 Pathways of alignment change; 2.2.1 Introduction; 2.2.2 Accusative> ergative; i. Via a passive construction

Ii. Via a possessive predication constructioniii. Pathways involving a passive/P-oriented participle; iv. Via an inverse construction; v. Via the reanalysis of an instrumental as ergative in a clause with zero-marked subject; vi. Via a nominalization as part of a periphrastic verb form; 2.2.3 Ergative> accusative; i. Via an antipassive; ii. Via an analytical verb form involving an intransitive auxiliary; iii. Via the reanalysis of topic copy pronouns as person indexing on the verb; 2.2.4 Tense-conditioned alignment arising via new constructions

2.2.5 Shift from tense-conditioned to consistent alignment2.2.6 Accusative> semantic alignment via demotion/suppression of agent; 2.2.7 Accusative> semantic alignment via extension; 2.2.8 Ergative> semantic alignment via demotion/suppression of object; 2.2.9 Similarities and differences between the pathways from syntactic to semantic alignment; 2.2.10 Semantic> syntactic (accusative or ergative) alignment; i. (Ergative>) semantic> accusative through extension; ii. (Accusative>) semantic> ergative through extension; iii. Process of extension

2.2.11 Reconstructing alignment change on the basis of markedness2.2.12 Processes involved in alignment change; 2.2.13 The role of language contact; 2.3 The development of tense-conditioned ergativity in Aramaic, Iranian, and Indic; 2.4 A full cycle of alignment change; 3: Aramaic; 3.1 Historical stages of Aramaic; 3.2 Morphosyntactic typology of Aramaic; 3.2.1 Root-and-pattern system; 3.2.2 Argument marking; 3.2.3 Word order; 3.2.4 Nominal morphology; 4: Alignment in Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects; 4.1 Overview; 4.2 Dialects with only accusative alignment; 4.2.1 Definition

4.2.2 Dialects with full inversion of subject/object indexes4.2.3 Dialects which only allow S-suffix objects in the third person or not at all; 4.2.4 Summary; 4.3 Jewish South-Eastern Trans-Zab dialects; 4.3.1 Definition; 4.3.2 Alignment in argument indexes; 4.3.3 Semantic/Split-S alignment; 4.4 Excursus: Is there syntactic ergativity in NENA?; 4.4.1 Indexation; 4.4.2 Coreferentiality; 4.4.3 Word order; 4.4.4 Control of reflexives; 4.4.5 Relativization; 4.4.6 Summary; 4.5 Dialects with non-accusative alignment in the perfect; 4.5.1 Definition

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