Grammatical Change in Indo-European Languages

“

A central motif in this collective effort reflects shifting relevance of morphology to syntax, and syntax to morphology. Referring to individual papers - among others- S.Luraghi in her paper on 'The origin of the feminine gender in PIE" maintains that there is no necessary relation between the collective and the feminine gender and proposes a new scenario explicating the developemnt from the original suffix deriving abstract nouns. B. Bauer in her paper on 'Strategies of definiteness in Latin' concludes that various nominal derivational processes and partitive adjectival constructions used to indicate 'degrees' of definiteness and were thus important forerunners of definite articles in Latin/Romance. V. Bubenik in his paper 'The rise and developemnt of the possessive construction in Middle Iranian' pinpoints some parallels with the development of the genitival construction in Albanian which reflects an earlier state of affairs resembling the relative pronoun of the Old Iranian; this intermediate scenario is now lost in Modern Persian whose ezafe particle is caseless and genderless. H. Andersen in 'On the origin of the Slavic aspect' examines the development of Slavic aspects from a new point of view combining comparative and internal analyses with the perspective of dialect geography. Unlike the traditional approaches based on the all-pervading parameter of 'perfectivity' he acknowledges several 'subaspects' (Determinate/Indeterminate, Imperfect/Aorist, Retrospective/Absolute, and Prospective/Actual). J. Barddal and E. Eythorsson in their paper 'The origin of the oblique-subject construction' conclude that PIE was a stative-active langauge, either a Split-S or a Fluid-S language, in which a subset of 'syntactic subjects' is case-marked in the same way as objects, and that 'oblique subjects' were a natural part of the original alignment system. Lively debate surrounding these issues is ongoing with an 'ammunition' from other language phyla.

”