This project is funded in part by the Bergen Research Foundation and in part by the University of Bergen and the Faculty of Humanities.

Project Description: It has been categorically assumed within both synchronic and diachronic linguistics that oblique or non-nominative subjects are a modern phenomenon in the Indo-European languages where they are attested, and that they have developed from objects, although the exact nature of this development remains both unexplored and unaccounted for. A more radical view was suggested in Eythórsson and Barðdal (2005) where it is argued that subject-like obliques in Germanic already behaved syntactically as subjects in Old Germanic. This raises the question whether there has at all been a development from object to subject status in the proto-language. In order to answer that question, a proper investigation will be carried out of non-canonically case-marked argument structure constructions in Indo-European, including the following: a) the semantics and predicate structure of oblique-subject predicates in the Indo-European languages, b) the syntactic function of the subject-like oblique in the early and archaic Indo-European languages, c) the distribution and nature of oblique anti-causative intransitives in the West-Indo-European languages, d) the origin, emergence and development of argument structures with oblique subjects in the IE languages, and e) the development of object case marking in the earliest IE languages.

The project will be carried out within the framework of Construction Grammar where sentence-level constructions are assumed to be form-meaning correspondences, similar to words. This will make it possible to reconstruct case and argument structure constructions for the proto-language, and hence complement previous reconstruction models of the relationships between the daughter languages, which are mostly based on comparative diachronic phonology and morphology. The project will thus result in a deeper understanding of the typological status of the Proto-Indo-European alignment system and how it has developed from the proto-language to the modern daughter languages.