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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure
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The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic - Cycles of Alignment Change (Hardcover)
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The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic - Cycles of Alignment Change (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics, 21
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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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
alignment in the perfect, which later developed into a past
perfective. However, while some modern dialects preserve a degree
of ergative alignment, 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. Thus an entire cycle of alignment change can be traced,
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 these alignment changes
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.
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