27.3946, Books: The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic: Coghill

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3946. Wed Oct 05 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3946, Books: The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic: Coghill

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Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2016 11:27:40
From: Carolyn Napolitano [Carolyn.Napolitano at oup.com]
Subject: The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic: Coghill

 


Title: The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic 
Subtitle: Cycles of Alignment Change 
Series Title: Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics  

Publication Year: 2016 
Publisher: Oxford University Press
	   http://www.oup.com/us
	

Book URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-and-fall-of-ergativity-in-aramaic-9780198723806 


Author: Eleanor Coghill

Hardback: ISBN:  9780198723806 Pages: 368 Price: U.S. $ 105


Abstract:

This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in
Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eastern Aramaic dialects
first developed tense-conditioned ergative aligment in the perfect, which
later developed into a past perfective. However, while some modern dialects
preserve a degree of ergative aligment, it has been eroded by movement towards
semantic/Split-S alignment and by the use of separate marking for the patient,
and some dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. These dialects
therefore show an entire cycle of alignment change, something which had
previously been considered unlikely.

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.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): Aramaic, Official (arc)

Language Family(ies): Semitic


Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=106613

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