From Case to Adposition: The Development of Configurational Syntax in Indo-European Languages

What is it about?

In the historical development of many languages in the Indo-European phylum the loss of inflectional morphology led to the developemnt of a configurational syntax, where syntactic position marked semantico/synatctic role. The first of these configurations was the adpositional (preposition or postposition), which developed out of the uninflected particle/preverbs in the older forms of IE by forming fixed phrases with nominal elements, a pattern later followed in the development of a configurational NP (article + nominal) and VP (auxiliary + verbal). In twelve chapters Dr Hewson follows this evolution in Greek, Baltic, Celtic, Romance and Germanic languages; Dr. Bubenik in Hittite, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Armenian, Slavic, Alabanian and reconstructed Proto-Indo-European.

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Why is it important?

In our work we put an emphasis on meaning (rather than on morphosyntax), and on systemic contrasts and systemic evolution (rather than on atomistic contrasts and the evolution of single items). We maintain that only from an understanding of the morphology one can come to an appreciation of the meaningful contrasts that the morphology marks, and ultimately of the systemic relationships built on those meaningful contrasts, the content systems, both simplex and complex, whose cognitive structure is marked by paradigms, by morphological sets. In its diachronic dimension we outlined the trajectories from synthetic to the analytic state of affiars, noting the parallels between the original IE case system and the systemic oppositions found in the stes of adpositions that replaced it. Quite apart from its theoretical analyses and proposals which in themselves amount to a new look at many traditional problems, this study has a value in the collected store of information on cases, and adpositions and their usage.

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