35.2080, Review: Oblique Subjects in Germanic: Barðdal (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2080. Mon Jul 22 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2080, Review: Oblique Subjects in Germanic: Barðdal (2023)

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Date: 23-Jul-2024
From: Michael Putnam [syntaxpunk at gmail.com]
Subject: Historical Linguistics: Barðdal (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.2866

AUTHOR: Jóhanna Barðdal
TITLE: Oblique Subjects in Germanic
SUBTITLE: Their Status, History and Reconstruction
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Language Change
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Michael Putnam

INTRODUCTION

In any theoretical treatment of language, one of the essential
presuppositions is to have a firm grasp on primitive concepts that can
be found in all, or most, known languages past and present. In the
generative traditional (broadly construed), discussions centering on
the notion of SUBJECT and OBJECT as core grammatical functions have
been a source of controversy for decades (see e.g. Fulk 2006 for an
excellent summary), with some frameworks, such as the Minimalist
Program, eschewing the distinction of SUBJECT and OBJECT as a
first-order primitive (see e.g. McCloskey 1997). Despite these recent
developments, this terminology continues to linger in formal analyses,
which can be the source of confusion and stagnation in advancing our
understanding of the development of argument structure alternations,
the syntactic distribution of arguments, and the assignment of
morphological case in both diachronic and synchronic grammars. It is
from this background that Jóhanna Barðdal launches her investigation
into the nature of ‘oblique subjects’, i.e., arguments that act as
subjects (to some degree) and are usually not expressed with
nominative case, in the history of Germanic languages. The primary
claims of this book are as follows: (1) that rather than interpreting
oblique subjects as developing originally from objects (i.e., in this
sense, the ‘non-prominent’ argument), alternating predicates (Nom-Dat
/ Dat-Nom) have co-existed at least since Early Germanic (if not
earlier, extending into PIE); (2) that assigning the designation of
‘subject’ to a syntactic argument is language-specific, and in some
cases, construction-specific.

SUMMARY

This monograph has 7 chapters. In Chapter 2, Barðdal establishes that
“the goal here is to demonstrate that syntactic behavior is neither
dependent on semantic verb classes nor on case frames” (p. 9). In
Section 1.3, she introduces a subset of tests for grammatical
relations (e.g., neutral word order, subject-verb inversion,
clause-bound reflexivization, long-distance reflexivization,
conjunction reduction, raising-to-subject, raising-to-object, and
control infinitives, etc.) that are commonly applied to examine
whether a given syntactic object exhibits subject-like properties.
These tests are applied throughout the remainder of this monograph.
Toward the conclusion of this chapter, Barðdal appeals to Construction
Grammar as an ideal framework to capture the language- and
construction-specific nature of subjecthood (and grammatical relations
more generally).

The focus of Chapter 2 centers on one key question; namely, what is a
subject? This chapter begins with a review of traditional approaches
to the notion of subjecthood, both from typological and theoretical
approaches, eventually questioning the universality of the notion of
‘subject’ as a universal category. In her review of the status of
subjecthood, Barðdal introduces the dichotomy between linguists who
define subjecthood based on ‘behavior properties’ (i.e., those whose
base assumption is that the distributional properties of oblique and
nominative subjects are similar) and those who adopt ‘coding
properties’ (i.e., those who exclude the designation of ‘subject’ to
non-nominative arguments). Barðdal accuses linguists in the latter
camp of ‘methodological opportunism, i.e., “different behaviors are
used to define the function of SUBJECT in different languages, without
a principled discussion of how to choose between the different tests”
(p. 33). Barðdal states that many previous approaches advocate for a
gradient interpretation of the classification of subject, which is a
situation she seeks to avoid in her treatment of these data. Barðdal
spends the remainder of this chapter with an initial comparison of
modern German and Icelandic (Section 2.3.2), foreshadowing a more
exhaustive treatment of German in Chapter 6.

In Chapter 3, Barðdal introduces the conceptualization of alternating
predicates, which consist of: (1) two syntactic arguments (a dative
and a nominative) and (2) the option that either of these arguments
can take, or select, the subject role and/or the object role. The
remainder of this chapter provides an empirically rich survey of
historical Germanic languages and other PIE-languages advocating for
the existence of these alternating predicates since at least the Early
Germanic period. As further evidence in favor of this proposal,
Barðdal delivers an alternative analysis of the development of the
verbs ‘like’ and ‘seem’ in Early Germanic from an alternating
predicate-perspective in Section 3.5 and provides some ample food for
thought for what this proposal means for the development of ‘free’
datives in Section 3.6.

Building upon her review of historical Germanic data in the previous
chapter, in Chapter 4 Barðdal applies subject tests to these
historical Germanic languages to disprove the Object-to-Subject
Hypothesis held by some historical linguists. In its place, and in
concert with the analysis put forward and developed in this monograph,
Barðdal champions the Oblique Subject Hypothesis (Section 4.1.7), and
its continuation, the Extended Intransitive Hypothesis (Pooth et al.,
2019). The primary goal of Chapter 5 is in some respects a
continuation of the previous chapter, arguing for the validity of
syntactic reconstruction from Proto-to-Germanic. In this chapter,
Barðdal names 5 common criticisms of syntactic reconstruction, and
successfully dismisses these criticisms.

Barðdal turns to modern German in Chapter 6, with a particular focus
on oblique subject predicates that select the Dat-Nom case frame. As
foreshadowed earlier in the monograph, Barðdal claims that Icelandic
and German share many commonalities in how they license oblique
subjects, with the essential difference that the latter is different
in its reliance on ellipsis in some of these environments. Barðdal
concludes this monograph in Chapter 7, drawing attention and reviewing
the central research questions addressed and making closing arguments
in favor of the analysis developed in the previous chapters.

EVALUATION

This monograph highlights three decades worth of individual and
collaborative research by the author on this topic. Barðdal makes a
very convincing case concerning the proposal that these alternating
argument structures have existed throughout the diachrony and
development of Germanic languages (and potentially extending into
PIE). The interesting claim that oblique subjects in modern German
exist on par with those found in Icelandic, barring ellipsis
constraints in the former language, is intriguing and merits further
research. My main point of criticism of this monograph is two-fold.
First, although Barðdal provides an exhaustive investigation of the
syntactic distribution of subjects throughout this monograph, there is
a lack of coverage of other related aspects of grammar, most notably,
passive voice constructions and the subject-verb agreement involving
oblique subjects. The semantic connections between morphological cases
such as accusative and dative are cross-linguistically well
established (Kagan, 2020; see Jónsson, 2013 for a discussion of
inherent case in Icelandic), and the development of passive voice and
subject-verb agreement in these constructions provides additional
factors that must be accounted for in a comprehensive treatment of the
development of oblique subjects. The data in contemporary Icelandic
also seems to be somewhat variant in this domain (Eythórsson &
Jónsson, 2009), which should be acknowledged in future work. Second,
generative approaches to this topic also seem to embrace and advocate
for a related claim of the disconnection between argument structure
frames and the realization of morphological case both in modern
Icelandic (Árnadóttir & Sigurðsson, 2013) and in diachrony (Viðarsson,
2022). Although I take an agnostic stance on the choice of framework
in this review, the call for similar mapping algorithms to account for
oblique subjects found in different frameworks should be viewed as a
strength of the proposal under discussion. (And for good measure, see
Landau (2010) who advances a proposal that the syntactic structure of
experiencer subjects is distinct from agentive ones
cross-linguistically.)

In summary, the rich empirical coverage of oblique subjects in
Germanic languages past and present found in this monograph is
unparalleled in the literature and will be a useful guide to future
research on this topic moving forward. The theoretical insights
advanced here will also serve as an important starting point for
continued research on the development and status of oblique subjects
in Germanic and beyond for decades to come. Agreeing with McCloskey
(1997) and Barðdal, the notion of SUBJECT as a universal category is
indeed questionable at best.

REFERENCES

Árnadóttir, Hlíf and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson. Case in disguise. 2013.
In Beatrix Fernández and Ricardo Etxepare (eds.), Variation in
datives: A microcomparative perspective. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. 96-143.

Eythórsson, Thórhallur and Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson. 2009. Variation in
Icelandic morphosyntax. In Andreas Dufter, Jürg Fleischer, and Guido
Seiler (eds.), Describing and modelling variation in grammar. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter. 83-96.

Falk, Yehuda N. 2006. Subjects and universal grammar: An explanatory
theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli. 2013. Dative versus accusative and the nature
of inherent case. In Beatrix Fernández and Ricardo Etxepare (eds.),
Variation in datives: A microcomparative perspective. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.144-160.

Kagan, Olga. 2020. The semantics of case. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Landau, Idan. 2010. The local syntax of experiencers. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.

McCloskey, James. 1997. Subjecthood and subject positions. In Liliane
Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 197-235.

Pooth, Roland, Peter Alexander Kerkhof, Leonid Kulikov, and Jóhanna
Barðdal. 2019. The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in
Proto-Indo-European: Accusative, ergative, or semantic alignment.
Indogermanische Forschungen 123. 245-263.

Viðarsson, Heimir F. 2022. From Old to Modern Icelandic: Dative
applicatives and NP/DP configurationality. In Barbara Egedi and
Veronika Hegedűs (eds.), Functional heads across time: Syntactic
reanalysis and change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 210-236.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Michael T. Putnam is Professor of German & Linguistics at Penn State
University, and currently serves as the Director of the Linguistics
Program and Associate Director of the Center for Language Science at
Penn State. His research focuses on the syntax-morphology/lexicon
interface, with a strong empirical focus on Germanic languages and
dialects past and present.



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