The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in Proto-Indo-European: Accusative, ergative, or semantic alignment

Indogermanischen Forschungen. 2019. Vol. 124. P. 245–264.

Pooth R., Kerkhof P. A., Kulikov L., Barðdal J.

For a long time one of the most bewildering conundrums of Indo-European linguistics has been the issue of how to reconstruct the alignment system of this ancient language state, given the lack of distinction between S and O marking in the Proto-Indo-European neuters nouns and the problem of the Hittite ergative. An additional complication stems from the existence of argument structure constructions where the subject(-like) argument is marked in a different case than the nominative, like the accusative or the dative. The aim of the present article is to fill two needs with one deed and offer a unified account of this century-long bone of contention. In contribution to the ongoing discussion in the field, we claim that a semantic alignment system, in the terms of Donohue & Wichmann (2008), might not only fit better with the morphological data that are currently reconstructed for the ancestral language, but also with the existence of non-canonically case-marked subjects in general (Barðdal et al. 2013;  Danesi, Johnson & Barðdal 2017).

Keywords: лабильность, argument structure, ergativity, эргативность, актантная структура, lability, морфонология, alignment, morphophonology, semantic alignment, morphosyntactic alignment, неканоническое подлежащее, кодирование актантов, Proto-Indo-European, праиндоевропейский язык, non-nominative subject, converse lability, cтратегия кодирования глагольных актантов