The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic: Cycles of Alignment Change (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics) [Illustrated] 9780198723806, 0198723806

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The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic

OXFORD STUDIES IN DIACHRONIC AND HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS GENERAL EDITORS:

Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts, University of Cambridge

A D V I S O R Y E D I T O R S : Cynthia Allen, Australian National University; Ricardo BermúdezOtero, University of Manchester; Theresa Biberauer, University of Cambridge; Charlotte Galves, University of Campinas; Geoff Horrocks, University of Cambridge; Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University; Anthony Kroch, University of Pennsylvania; David Lightfoot, Georgetown University; Giuseppe Longobardi, University of York; George Walkden, University of Manchester; David Willis, University of Cambridge RECENTLY PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES

 Arabic Indefinites, Interrogatives, and Negators A Linguistic History of Western Dialects David Wilmsen  Syntax over Time Lexical, Morphological, and Information-Structural Interactions Edited by Theresa Biberauer and George Walkden  Syllable and Segment in Latin Ranjan Sen  Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit The Syntax and Semantics of Adjectival Verb Forms John J. Lowe  Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian Virginia Hill and Gabriela Alboiu  The Syntax of Old Romanian Edited by Gabriela Pană Dindelegan  Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo-Aryan Uta Reinöhl  The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic Cycles of Alignment Change Eleanor Coghill

The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic Cycles of Alignment Change

EL EAN O R COG HI LL

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Eleanor Coghill  The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in  Impression:  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press  Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number:  ISBN –––– Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For my parents, Charles and Sylvia Coghill

Contents Series preface Acknowledgements List of maps and tables Abbreviations and glosses

xi xii xiv xvi

 Introduction



 Alignment



. Alignment of verbal arguments .. Syntactic alignment .. Semantic/Split-S alignment .. Manifestation of alignment . Pathways of alignment change .. Introduction .. Accusative > ergative .. Ergative > accusative .. Tense-conditioned alignment arising via new constructions .. Shift from tense-conditioned to consistent alignment .. Accusative > semantic alignment via demotion/suppression of agent .. Accusative > semantic alignment via extension .. Ergative > semantic alignment via demotion/suppression of object .. Similarities and differences between the pathways from syntactic to semantic alignment .. Semantic > syntactic (accusative or ergative) alignment .. Reconstructing alignment change on the basis of markedness .. Processes involved in alignment change .. The role of language contact . The development of tense-conditioned ergativity in Aramaic, Iranian, and Indic . A full cycle of alignment change

                   

viii

Contents

 Aramaic



. Historical stages of Aramaic . Morphosyntactic typology of Aramaic .. Root-and-pattern system .. Argument marking .. Word order .. Nominal morphology

     

 Alignment in Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects



. Overview . Dialects with only accusative alignment .. Definition .. Dialects with full inversion of subject/object indexes .. Dialects which only allow S-suffix objects in the third person or not at all .. Summary . Jewish South-Eastern Trans-Zab dialects .. Definition .. Alignment in argument indexes .. Semantic/Split-S alignment . Excursus: Is there syntactic ergativity in NENA? .. Indexation .. Coreferentiality .. Word order .. Control of reflexives .. Relativization .. Summary . Dialects with non-accusative alignment in the perfect .. Definition .. Jewish SE Trans-Zab dialects with non-accusative perfect .. Non-SE Trans-Zab dialects with a transitive/intransitive distinction in the perfect .. Summary . Ṭ uroyo Neo-Aramaic .. Alignment in argument indexes .. Alignment in argument marking on noun phrases .. Absence of ergative alignment elsewhere in the Ṭ uroyo Group . Split-S/semantic alignment in NENA, Ṭ uroyo, and beyond . Alignment patterns in NENA and Ṭ uroyo argument indexes

                           

Contents  The verbal system and alignment in earlier Eastern Aramaic . . .

Predication and tense–aspect–mood (TAM) categories Alignment The morphosyntax of the Qṭil li construction in Late Eastern Aramaic .. Patient marking .. Agent marking .. The role of information structure in agent expression .. Other syntactic behaviour of Qṭil li .. Tense–aspect–mood (TAM) values of Qṭil li

 The origin and development of the Qṭil li construction . . . . . . . . .

. .

. . . .

Introduction Influence of Iranian languages Qṭil li: From a possessive construction? Link to perfect aspect Possessive versus Passive Theory Passive + Experiencer Dative Theory Experiencer Dative versus Possessive Theory l- marking another semantic role with non-experiential verbs Qṭil li and passivity .. Claims as to the passive nature of the construction at various diachronic stages .. Is NENA Qṭəlli passive? .. Is Late Aramaic Qṭil li passive? .. Does Qṭil li result from the reanalysis of a passive plus agent? Origin of Qṭil li: Summary Reconstructing the development of Qṭil li .. Reanalysis of l- as agent marker .. Qṭil li takes over as the general past perfective .. Development of person indexes on the Present and Past Bases .. The disappearance in most dialects of ergative flagging of noun phrases l- as marker of focused agent in NENA The fate of Qṭil li in Neo-Mandaic Role of language contact and the linguistic area Summary of the development of tense-conditioned ergativity in Eastern Aramaic

ix                                 

x

Contents

 The decline of ergative alignment and new developments . . . . . .

Introduction Ergative to Accusative via Split-S/semantic alignment Some observations on typological tendencies in Split‑S systems Alternative strategies developed for P Why was the ergative not generalized in any Aramaic dialect? Later development of PAST-S and the emergence of new perfects .. PAST-S used for passive .. PAST-S used actively, with implied, usually pl., agent .. PAST-S specialized for perfect with intransitives only, creating gap for transitives .. Asymmetry resolved in various ways .. Summary of the development of PAST(intr)-S and competing forms .. Parallels in Aramaic and Semitic to the extension of an intransitive perfect construction to transitives

 Conclusions . The renewal of the Eastern Aramaic verbal system and resultant change in alignment . The development of new perfects as a potential trigger for alignment change . Implications for theory and future research Appendices Appendix A: All cases of Qṭil li from the Syriac Corpus Appendix B: Examples of Qṭil li gathered from Syriac secondary sources and other miscellaneous examples Appendix C: Examples of Qṭil li from Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Appendix D: Examples of Qṭil li from Classical Mandaic Appendix E: Verb lexemes found in Prefix Conjugation forms in the Syriac Corpus References Index of languages Index of subjects

                         

Series preface Modern diachronic linguistics has important contacts with other subdisciplines, notably first-language acquisition, learnability theory, computational linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the traditional philological study of texts. It is now recognized in the wider field that diachronic linguistics can make a novel contribution to linguistic theory, to historical linguistics, and arguably to cognitive science more widely. This series provides a forum for work in both diachronic and historical linguistics, including work on change in grammar, sound, and meaning within and across languages; synchronic studies of languages in the past; and descriptive histories of one or more languages. It is intended to reflect and encourage the links between these subjects and fields such as those mentioned above. The goal of the series is to publish high-quality monographs and collections of papers in diachronic linguistics generally, i.e. studies focusing on change in linguistic structure, and/or change in grammars, which are also intended to make a contribution to linguistic theory, by developing and adopting a current theoretical model, by raising wider questions concerning the nature of language change, or by developing theoretical connections with other areas of linguistics and cognitive science as listed above. There is no bias towards a particular language or language family, or towards a particular theoretical framework; work in all theoretical frameworks, and work based on the descriptive tradition of language typology, as well as quantitatively based work using theoretical ideas, also feature in the series. Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts University of Cambridge

Acknowledgements Any academic work is built on the work of others. I am particularly conscious in this work, however, of the debt I owe to my fellow Neo-Aramaicists and their tireless efforts in documenting these highly endangered dialects. Although these scholars are referenced in the text, I would like to explicitly acknowledge the work of Geoffrey Khan and Otto Jastrow, as providing particularly crucial data and analysis without which this work would have been impossible. Likewise the painstaking work of colleagues on the early Neo-Aramaic manuscripts has also been crucial: I have depended particularly on the work of Alessandro Mengozzi and Yona Sabar in this respect. The spirit of cooperation, enthusiasm, and friendship within the small international community of Neo-Aramaicists has moreover made it a pleasure to work within this field. Of course the work of Neo-Aramaicists would not be possible without the cooperation of speakers of Aramaic of the various communities. The generosity with which they offer their time and their warm hospitality has made working in this field a fascinating and enjoyable experience. The number of personal communications cited in this work attest to the helpfulness and patience of fellow scholars from a variety of fields as well as native speakers of various languages, some of whom I did not know personally, in taking time to answer my queries. Among those who helped me along the way are (in alphabetical order) Lila Adamou, Peter Arkadiev, Eli Avrahami, Zeki Bilgic, Miriam Butt, Bernard Comrie, Alinda Damsma, Serena Danesi, Steven Fassberg, Margaretha Folmer, Geoff Haig, Amir Harrak, Martin Haspelmath, John Healey, Giorgio Iemmolo, Ali Jaff, Otto Jastrow, Thomas Jügel, Geoffrey Khan, René Lacroix, Andrej Malchukov, Elsa Oréal, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Frans Plank, Tanja Samardžić, Shabo Talay, Tobias Weber, Martin West, and Fernando Zúñiga. As I discussed ideas from this work at various conferences, I must also acknowledge the very helpful feedback I received from fellow scholars, even if I cannot recall now the names of all those who commented. I would particularly like to thank Charles Häberl, who always responded swiftly and in a detailed manner to my numerous enquiries about Mandaic, and helped with the Mandaic examples (any mistakes in them are however my own responsibility). Matthew Morgenstern likewise gave me vital assistance with Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. I received crucial feedback on drafts from Eitan Grossman, Na’ama Pat-El, Ilja Seržant, and Ariel Gutman. The latter also helped me a great deal in accessing sources in Modern Hebrew, while Nadia Vidro kindly helped in this (and with a Russian source) at an earlier stage.

Acknowledgements

xiii

Naturally, the ideas and evidence presented in this work are entirely my own responsibility. I would also like to thank the editorial staff at OUP for their professionalism and helpfulness throughout the process. I am grateful to Guy Deutscher for being a mentor for me early in my linguistic career and for encouraging me to aim high; also Alice Harris and Paul Kiparsky, who each encouraged me in the early stages to turn this research into a monograph. I am indebted to my Doktorvater Geoffrey Khan for introducing me to the wonders of Neo-Aramaic and for his encouragement and support since my undergraduate days. Frans Plank and Aditi Lahiri also gave me confidence in my work which helped sustain me during this stage of my career. I would also like to thank Matthias Armgardt and Dorothea Weltecke for their interest in and support of Aramaic at Konstanz. The Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz was my academic home for the crucial period of work on the book, and its multidisciplinary atmosphere and supportive staff (in particular Anda Lohan and Martina Böttcher) made it a wonderful place to work. Most of all it offered me academic independence, which allowed me to follow my intellectual interests wherever they might lead. I would also like to acknowledge the German Research Foundation, which funded a part of the research for this book. I would like to thank all my friends for their moral support during this long process, notably but not only Shanika Winters, Aptin Khanbaghi, Antje Lahne, Tash Sabbagh, Roberta Borghero, Jahanara Begum, Gillian Margolin, Nurjamal Omurkanova, Charlotte Weiss, Astrid Schaulies, Gilda Giebel, Ioanna Salvarina, Somar Borghol, Maria Hidvegi, Giorgio Iemmolo, Fariba Zamani, Julia Boll, and Nina Scheider. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues Zeki Bilgic, Ralph Barczok, and Georges Toro of the Forschungsstelle für Aramäische Studien for inspiration and moral support during the last phase. My parents and sister are owed particular gratitude for supporting and encouraging me patiently and lovingly throughout this long undertaking.

List of maps and tables Maps  North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, Ṭ uroyo, and Mlaḥ so  Neo-Aramaic dialects (all branches)  Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects with non-accusative alignment in past perfective or perfect  Attested cases of Split-S alignment in the wider linguistic area

xxii   

Tables . Accusative vs ergative alignment . Subject inflection of bases

 

. Order of suffixes on Past and Present Bases . Alignment of indexes in dialects with full inversion

 

. Dialects without full inversion: Third person only



. Dialects without full inversion: No S-suffix objects at all . Inflection of verbal bases

 

. Alignment in Jewish SE Trans-Zab dialects (simplified) . Alignment in Jewish SE Trans-Zab dialects

 

. Ṭ uroyo inflection compared to that of Jewish Sulemaniyya



. Alignment in Ṭ uroyo . SA and SP verbs in Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects

 

. Aktionsart . Sp Verbs in J. Sulemaniyya

 

. Alignment patterns in Eastern Neo-Aramaic past perfectives



. TAM categories in Syriac . Absolute and Emphatic States in Syriac

 

. Variation in agent expression in Qṭil li constructions . Semantic distribution of Qṭil li tokens in Corpus (Appendix A)

 

. Shift from experiencer to agent marker



List of maps and tables

xv

. Lexical distribution of Late Eastern Aramaic active perfects . Lexical and semantic development of Late Aramaic perfects

 

. The chain shift of perfects and perfectives



. Scenarios for the development of new perfects and their potential for leading to ergativity in the perfect ( >perfective/past)



Abbreviations and glosses Note that most glosses, whether of Aramaic or of other languages, are my own or have been adapted from those in the sources in order to achieve consistency. Thus any mistakes in glossing are my own responsibility. A

Agent (syntactic category based on prototypical transitive verb; see Comrie : )

ABL

ablative

ABS

absolutive marker

ACC

accusative case (I use this also for indexes in preference to obj: see Haspelmath  for justification)

ACT/act.

active

ADE

adessive case

AG

agentive

AHL

Academy of the Hebrew Language Historical Dictionary Project

ANT

anterior (glossing the morpheme -wa in NENA or Ṭ uroyo)

AOR

aorist

Ap.

Aphʿel derivation (in Late Aramaic)

AP

active participle (including the Late Aramaic active participle in the predicative Absolute State)

ATTR

attributive (including for glossing Emphatic State in Late Aramaic, where relevant)

AUX

auxiliary

C

consonant (in Semitic templates, e.g. Past Base CCəC-)

c.

circa

C.

Christian

CAIB

Corpus of the Aramaic Incantation Bowls: Isbell ()

CAUS

causative

COMP

complementizer

COP

copula

corr.

correct/correction

DAT

dative

DB

Darius’ Inscription at Behistun

Abbreviations and glosses DEIC

deictic particle

DEIC.COP

deictic copula

deriv.

derivation

DET

determiner

DIR

direct case (in Kurdish)

DIR

direct voice (as opposed to inverse voice)

DOM

differential object marking

encl.

enclitic

ERG

ergative marker

Eshtap.

Eshtaphʿal derivation (in Late Aramaic)

Etpa.

Ethpaʿʿal derivation (in Late Aramaic)

Etpe.

Ethpeʿel derivation (in Late Aramaic)

Et-Q.

Quadriradical Et-derivation, Ethpalpal derivation (in Late Aramaic)

Ettap.

Ettaphʿal derivation (in Late Aramaic)

EXIST

existential marker

f.

feminine

FOC

focus

FPL/fpl.

feminine plural

FS/fs.

feminine singular

FUT

future tense

GEM

gemination (doubling) of a consonant in certain morpological contexts

GEN

genitive

Hb Hb

word(s) in Hebrew

IND

indicative

INDF_SPEC

indefinite specific

INF

infinitive

IMP

imperative

INS

instrumental case

INTR/intr.

intransitive

INV

inverse voice

IPFV

imperfective

IRR

irrealis (e.g. for glossing Prefix Conjugation in Late Aramaic)

J.

Jewish

...

L

L-suffix (in NENA and Ṭ uroyo glosses)

lit.

literally

xvii

xviii

Abbreviations and glosses

LOC

locative

m.

masculine

MID

middle voice (in Sanskrit)

MPASS

mediopassive (for glossing the Et-derivations in Late Aramaic)

MPL/mpl.

masculine plural

MS/ms.

masculine singular

N/n.

neuter

NEG

negator

NENA

North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic

NMLZ

nominalizer

NOM

nominative case (I use this also for indexes in preference to SBJ: see Haspelmath  for justification. In glossing pre-modern Aramaic finite verbs with no object suffix, NOM will usually be omitted)

NONFUT

non-future tense

NP

noun phrase

NPL

neuter plural

NS

neuter singular

OBJ

object marker

OBL

oblique case (in Kurdish)

OBV

obviative case (in direct/inverse alignment or voice)

OT

Old Testament

P

Patient (syntactic category based on prototypical transitive verb; see Comrie : )

Pa.

Paʿʿel derivation (in Late Aramaic)

pass.

passive

PASS

passive

PAST

Past Base (in Eastern Neo-Aramaic glosses)

PAT

patientive

Pe.

Peʿal derivation (in Late Aramaic)

PFV

perfective

PL/pl.

plural

PN

personal name

POSS

possessive

PP

passive participle (including the Late Aramaic passive participle in the predicative Absolute State)

Abbreviations and glosses

xix

PRED

predicative (including for glossing Absolute State in predicative function in Late Aramaic)

PRES

Present Base (in Eastern Neo-Aramaic glosses)

P-RES

P‑oriented resultative (in Russian)

PRF

perfect

PRG

progressive aspect

PRN

personal pronoun

pron.

pronoun

PROX

proximate case (in direct/inverse alignment or voice)

PRS

present tense

PRT

particle (used when the function is difficult to define)

PST

past tense

PST_PFV

past perfective (e.g. for glossing Suffix Conjugation in Late Aramaic)

PTC

particle

PTCP

participle

PV

preverb (in Georgian glosses)

Q

question particle

Q

quadriradical (verb lexeme)

QUOT

quotative

R

Recipient (syntactic category based on prototypical ditransitive verb)

REL

relativizer

RES_PTCP

resultative participle (in NENA)

S

single argument of an intransitive verb (syntactic category based on a prototypical intransitive verb; see Comrie : )

S

S-suffix (in NENA and Ṭ uroyo glosses)

S

subject marker (in Georgian glosses)

SBJ

subject marker

SBJV

subjunctive

SE

South-East

SG

singular

Syr.

Syriac

TAD

Textbook of Aramaic Documents: Porten and Yardeni (–)

TAM

tense–aspect–mood

TNS

tense

tr./TR

transitive

TR.PST_PFV

transitive past perfective, i.e. qam‑/kəm‑/gəm‑ prefix on Present Base in NENA

xx

Abbreviations and glosses

trans.

translator

V.

version

var.

variant

VM

Version marker (in Georgian glosses)

VOC

vocative

vol.

volume

VRB_ADJ

verbal adjective (including Late Aramaic CaCCiC forms)

WALS

World Atlas of Linguistic Structures. Available online at

XPf

Old Persian inscription of Xerxes, known as the ‘Harem Inscription’

Transcription of Semitic languages ʿ

[ʕ]

ʾ

[ʔ] [ɣ]

ġ

A dot underneath a letter indicates velarization/pharyngealization, e.g.: [Sˁ]

Ṣ

except in the following case: ḥ

[ħ]

Silent letters in Syriac are put in superscript in the transcription: h

[wā]

+

emphasis (velarization/pharyngealization) as a suprasegmental feature

wā

Symbols =

connects a clitic (N.B. the borderline between clitic and affix is not clear-cut, and I have not tried to mark all (potential) clitics as such, only to be consistent in the glossing of individual morphemes)




developed into

?

of uncertain grammaticality

*

(i) reconstructed earlier form or (ii) ungrammatical

Where degemination has occurred across a morpheme boundary, it may be restored in square brackets to ease glossing, e.g. la-hua mṣi-n=[n]in

Signs used in texts (xxx)

text erased during transmission (in Talmud text, whether original script or Roman transliteration)

Abbreviations and glosses

xxi

[xxx]

a text addition in the original manuscript

?xxx?

uncertain reading of letters

!xxx!

mistake in the textual transmission (in Talmud text)

xxx(?)

uncertain form

x(xx)

restored full version of a word that has been abbreviated, e.g. r(aḇ) for r' (in Talmud transcription)

xxx(?)

uncertain translation

(xxx)

translation of contextual Aramaic text that has been omitted (in translations)

[Var. –]

preceding word absent in one or more manuscripts

[xxx]

words not in original, added to aid comprehension (in Talmud translation)

[xxx]

restored letters (in magic bowl texts)

‫˚א‬

the circle above the letter indicates that it is only partially preserved (in magic bowl texts)

xxx

the dotted line indicates that the letters transliterated are only partially preserved (in the Roman transliteration of the magic bowl texts)

........

MLAH.SO

TURKEY

Hertevin

Bohtan

URMI Gaznax Billin Bne-Lagippa Bēs.pәn Umra Ashitha Barwar Umra d-Shish Betanure Nerwa Peshabur Zakho Tin Amadiya Aradhin Hamziye Rustaqa Alqosh Shosh-u-Sharmin Telkepe

T.UROYO

IRAN Sainqala

ea

Mosul

Karimlesh Ankawa

Qaraqosh

Gr

SYRIA

tZ

ab

Bokan

Erbil/Arbel

Saqqiz

Koy Sanjaq

Bana Sulemaniyya

Tikab Bijar Pirtaj

Panjwin

H.alabja

IRAQ

Sanandaj

Kamyaran Khanaqin

Qasr-e-Shirin Kerend

MAP  North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, Ṭ uroyo, and Mlaḥ so

1 Introduction There is ever more awareness among linguists of the great variation that languages show in encoding arguments of verbs, in particular in the diverse ways that they divide up the various syntactic or semantic roles, known as argument alignment. At the same time, interest has increased in the question of how shifts occur from one alignment to another. This book aims to show the precise pathways and motivations involved in alignment changes in a language with an unusually long historical record, namely Aramaic. While plausible pathways have been reconstructed to explain alignment systems in several languages, there are few language families where these can be supported with actual historical evidence. The Aramaic case benefits not only from a historical record of nearly  years, but also from the fine-grained documentation of dialects that we now have. Aramaic is a language of the Semitic language family, which in turn belongs to the Afroasiatic language family. The first texts in Aramaic date to the ninth to seventh centuries BC and include inscriptions in the Aramaean kingdoms of what is now Syria and Turkey, as well as Aramaic notes added to Akkadian cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia. Even in the earliest phase of the language one can already recognize dialectal diversity. The dialects continued to diverge over the centuries, and eventually clearly distinct written forms emerged, used by various ethno-religious groups in the Near East: polytheists, Jews, Samaritans, Mandaeans, and Christians of various eastern Churches. The dialects which have survived till today are extremely diverse and constitute a language family rather than a single language. The premodern varieties which will figure most prominently in this book are: Imperial Aramaic (dating to around – BC) and the Late Eastern Aramaic dialects (c. AD –), namely Syriac, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, and Mandaic. The modern varieties are Ṭ uroyo and Mlaḥ so, which form a single family native to Turkey, and the larger and very diverse North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) family, with dialects spoken by Jews and Christians in a region spanning the border areas of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. The rich documentary record for Aramaic shows various stages of alignment change, in particular in argument indexing on the verb, from fully nominative– accusative to tense-conditioned ergative, and then back to nominative–accusative. The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic. First edition. Eleanor Coghill. © Eleanor Coghill . First Published  by Oxford University Press



Introduction

Up to and including the Late Aramaic stage, Aramaic was accusatively aligned in its main tenses: () Syriac (Late Eastern Aramaic) a. šqal-t-āh take.PST_PFV-NOM.SG-ACC.FS ‘I took her.’

b. ʔeṯi-ṯ come.PST_PFV-NOM.SG ‘I came.’

At the stage of Late Aramaic, distinct perfect constructions for transitive and intransitive verbs developed. In these the underlying patient triggered the same indexing on the verb as the intransitive core argument, while the agent was encoded differently. This is in effect ergative alignment: () Syriac a. šqil-ā take.PASS.PTCP-FS ‘I have taken her.’

l-i DAT-SG

b. ʔaṯy-ā=nā come.VRB_ADJ-FS=I ‘I (f.) have come.’

c. ʔaṯy-ā come.VRB_ADJ-FS ‘She has come.’ In some Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects these constructions broadened their functions and replaced the old past perfective tense, leading to ergative alignment in the main past tense. This stage is still seen in some modern dialects: () Jewish Sulemaniyya North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic a. šəql-a-li b. híy-an take.PST_PFV-ABS.FS-ERG.SG come.PST_PFV-ABS.FS ‘I took her.’ ‘I (f.) came.’ c. híy-a come.PST_PFV-ABS.FS ‘She came.’ In other dialects the transitive/intransitive distinction in this tense was levelled, resulting once again in accusative alignment in the past tense (and throughout the language): () Christian Alqosh North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic a. šqil-ā-li b. θe-li take.PST_PFV-ACC.FS-NOM.SG come.PST_PFV-NOM.SG ‘I took her.’ ‘I came.’ This work will look at both the development of ergativity in the past perfective and also at how it was later eroded. For the first process it will show that previous

Introduction



scenarios posited are not supported by the evidence, and argue for a different one, namely that the ergative construction, known as the Qṭil li construction, developed out of a construction with a dative-marked experiencer, initially used with verbs of perception and cognition. It will demonstrate that, although this scenario shares some features of the others, it is nevertheless quite distinct. Chapters  and  give background and context for the main arguments of the book. Chapter  presents the current understanding of alignment of verbal arguments. First, the areas of language which may exhibit alignment are outlined, namely case, person indexing, and syntax. Then, various mechanisms by which alignment may change are presented: these are discussed with regard to actual cases where such mechanisms are thought to have brought about alignment change. Some general observations are also made on processes of alignment change, as well as the role that language contact may play. Finally, the focus is brought to bear on shifts from accusative to ergative in the past or perfective, as occurred in Eastern Aramaic dialects. Various theories as to how this may happen are examined, in particular with regard to the Aramaic case and that of neighbouring Iranian languages. Chapter  introduces the Aramaic language, giving a brief overview of its various phases and dialectal divisions, then some basic information about its linguistic structure. In Chapter  the various alignment patterns attested in Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects are described in detail. Firstly, the dialects with only accusative alignment are presented. These show an inversion of the subject/object indexes between tenses which is a relic of an earlier ergative stage. Then the Jewish South-Eastern Trans-Zab dialects are described. These constitute the NENA dialects which still retain some degree of ergative alignment in the past perfective, but the picture is complicated by the existence of some intransitive verbs which behave like transitives (Split‑S alignment). Next, it is considered whether there is evidence for syntactic ergativity in NENA. Then some dialects are presented which have developed non-accusative alignment in the perfect. These include but are not restricted to those which have non-accusative alignment in the past perfective. Next, the alignment patterns found in Ṭ uroyo are described: these also show a degree of ergativity. Then the role of Split‑S/semantic alignment in the relevant dialects is discussed, and parallels in other languages are presented which cast light on this. In Chapter , we move to the preceding phase of Eastern Aramaic, namely Late Eastern Aramaic, which covers Syriac, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, and Classical Mandaic. After giving an introduction to the verbal system and general alignment patterning (focusing on Syriac, the best-known of these dialects), the (proto‑)ergative construction Qṭil li (kill.PASS.PTCP DAT-SG ‘I have killed’) is introduced, its part in the tense–aspect–mood system outlined, and its morphosyntactic behaviour examined in detail. Chapter  deals with the origin of Qṭil li. After giving an account of its earliest attestations, the possibility of Iranian influence is discussed, as proposed by Kutscher



Introduction

(), based on similarities to the Old Persian construction Manā Kṛ tam (SG.GEN/ DAT do.PASS.PTCP ‘I have done’). The main theories regarding the source construction are then evaluated, namely the possessive and passive theories. The first proposes that Qṭil li developed from a possessive construction in the same way as the HAVE-perfects in Romance and Germanic, but with an obliquely marked possessor, which was reanalysed as an agent. The second proposes that it derived from a passive construction with agent. Then a different theory is outlined, namely that it originated as a construction taking an experiencer argument, which was later reanalysed as an agent. Evidence for this is presented, not only from cross-linguistic parallels, but also from a new corpus study which shows that Qṭil li favoured verbs of perception and cognition (which involve an experiencer) in its early stages. It is then shown how the dative experiencer scenario must be carefully distinguished from the possessive scenario, despite some formal similarities between them. Other possible scenarios involving affectees are also presented and assessed: these may have played a secondary role in the development of Qṭil li. After summarizing the conclusions about the origin of Qṭil li, I discuss claims as to the passive nature of the construction at various stages of its development, concluding that the construction as a whole was never a canonical passive, although the passiveness of the participle component was crucial for its development as an ergative construction. Next, I outline the development of Qṭil li into the modern forms, looking at the reanalysis of the dative experiencer marker as an agent marker, the shift in tense–aspect values, the development of person marking, and the disappearance in most dialects of ergative flagging of NPs. In an excursus I look at the development of the (erstwhile) dative preposition l- as a marker of focused NP agents of passives in northern NENA dialects. After again addressing the role of language contact, this time in more depth, Chapter  concludes with a summary of the development of ergativity in Eastern Aramaic. Chapter  addresses the erosion and (in most dialects) loss of ergative alignment, showing how this occurred via Split-S/semantic alignment, in which certain intransitive subjects (S arguments) came to align with the ergative A argument. It goes on to show that in those dialects in which the process was completed, and all S arguments align with A, the original intransitive construction, which had been restricted to verbs of particular Aktionsart, was not lost, but rather carved out distinct functions for itself in the tense–aspect system. While the Qṭil li construction had shifted from expressing a narrow present perfect to a general past perfective, the intransitive construction continued to express a specialized resultative perfect. Initially limited to intransitives and passives, in some dialects it was extended to transitives. Presenting dialectal and historical data, this chapter shows the diverse ways in which an original asymmetry can be resolved, in particular how morphology marking both a transitivity and an aspectual distinction can come to mark only one of these distinctions. Summing up the evolution of the intransitive paradigm into a perfect, it also

Introduction



presents even newer perfects that have been grammaticalized in the last few hundred years and how these relate to the older forms. The development of ergativity in Aramaic and its loss are tightly bound with the emergence of new perfects. After summarizing how the renewal of the Eastern Aramaic verbal system brought about a change in alignment, Chapter  examines more generally the role that new perfects can play in bringing about tenseconditioned ergativity. It shows that this can only be expected under certain conditions, and presents the possible paths that could lead to ergative alignment, offering models of alignment change that can be tested on other languages.

2 Alignment . Alignment of verbal arguments .. Syntactic alignment Already in the nineteenth century scholars discovered that some languages categorized verbal arguments in ways unfamiliar to them. They found that the nominative and accusative categories that had long been used for well-known European languages were not so useful in describing languages such as Basque. It became apparent that the ‘subject’ of an intransitive verb was, in such languages, encoded differently to the ‘subject’ of a transitive verb. Even more surprisingly, the ‘subject’ of the intransitive verb was encoded like the ‘object’ of a transitive verb. An early analysis of such verbal constructions was that they were passives (see, e.g., Schuchardt  for Basque). The obvious problem with this analysis was that passives are normally understood to be marked, less common, and morphologically derived, descriptions which did not fit the constructions under consideration. As these constructions became better understood, they acquired their own labels to replace ‘nominative’ and ‘accusative’, namely ‘absolutive’ for the case expressing both the single argument of the intransitive verb (S) and the patient of the transitive verb (P), and ‘ergative’ for the case expressing the agent of the transitive verb (A). The pattern itself became known as ergative–absolutive, or simply, ergative alignment. This was contrasted with the (nominative–)accusative alignment known from most European languages. Tongan (Austronesian) is an example of a language with ergative alignment. This is manifested in case marking on nouns, where the absolutive is marked by a preposed particle ʔa and the ergative with ʔe: ()

Tongan a. Naʔe

ʔalu PST go ‘John went.’

ʔa ABS

Sione. John

b. Naʔe

ʔa

PST

kai ʔe Sione eat ERG John ‘John ate the mango.’ (Otsuka : )

ABS

e the

mango. mango

The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic. First edition. Eleanor Coghill. © Eleanor Coghill . First Published  by Oxford University Press

Alignment of verbal arguments



While ergative alignment is viewed by many speakers of (mostly accusatively aligned) European languages, including linguists, as exotic and counter-intuitive, the logic behind it may be seen in the following examples: ()

a. The woman (S) died. (Intransitive) b. The man (A) killed the woman (P). (Transitive)

In accusative alignment, the woman dying in (a) and the man killing her in (b) would take the same encoding. In ergative alignment, however, the woman who died would be encoded the same in both sentences (e.g. with the same case marking), while the agent of her death would be treated differently. Accusative alignment is for good reason more familiar to linguists: it seems to be more common in the world’s languages (Dixon : ).1 The following example from Standard Arabic shows typical accusative alignment in case marking: ()

Arabic a. mātat al-marʔat-u died.FS the-woman-NOM ‘The woman died.’ b. qatala al-rajul-u al-marʔat-a killed.MS the-man-NOM the-woman-ACC ‘The man killed the woman.’

In describing the difference between accusative alignment and ergative alignment, the following concepts have proven useful: i. S: the single argument of an intransitive verb ii. P: the argument expressing the patient of a prototypical transitive verb iii. A: the argument expressing the agent of a prototypical transitive verb These categories are not uncontroversial as cross-linguistic universals (see, e.g., Lazard  and Haig ). They are also defined differently by different typologists. Haspelmath () contrasts the usage of these terms by Dixon, Comrie, and Bickel. Haspelmath argues for Comrie’s usage (c: , : ), as being the most useful for cross-linguistic comparison. In this usage, A and P are syntactic categories defined on the basis of prototypical action clauses, involving verbs such as ‘kill’, ‘break’, ‘cut’, etc. Thus, in a given language, the argument functioning as an 1 Dixon (: ) estimates that ergativity is found in only a quarter of the world’s languages, while tripartite alignment is ‘extremely rare’ (Dixon : ). Looking only at the alignment of case marking of full noun phrases, out of  languages in the WALS database, fifty-two have some kind of accusative alignment, while thirty-two have ergative alignment (most of the rest have neutral alignment—i.e. make no A/S/P distinction in case marking) (Comrie ). In verbal person marking, the difference is greater: out of  languages,  have accusative alignment, while only nineteen have ergative alignment (Siewierska a).



Alignment

agent in such clauses is A, and the argument functioning as the patient is P. As Comrie (: ) notes, however, we ‘can continue to use [A and P] even when we pass beyond prototypical transitive situations (i.e. actions) to other constructions . . . A and P are thus syntactic terms, whose prototypes are defined in semantic terms’. This is the definition I follow here, although it is not without its problems.2 Certain verbal constructions may of course require other syntactic concepts: for instance, ditransitive constructions (such as with verbs of transfer, like give) involve T (the ‘theme’, e.g. the thing given) and R (‘recipient’). Typically, one or other of these may align with P, but other alignments are possible. These concepts and how they align will be considered as and when they are relevant. It is rare for the conceptual three-way distinction S/P/A to be reflected directly in actual languages. In practice, it is often the case that two of these categories align with each other, in either morphology or syntax, or both. For instance, if S and P are encoded in the same way (for instance, with the same case marker) or are indexed identically through person marking on the verb, we say that S and P align together (in case marking or indexing). The overall pattern is called ‘alignment’. Accusative alignment is the alignment of A and S together, as against P. Ergative alignment is the alignment of S and P, as against A. Accusative and ergative alignment may be contrasted in Table .. TABLE . Accusative vs ergative alignment Accusative alignment NOMINATIVE

Ergative alignment A S

ACCUSATIVE

ERGATIVE ABSOLUTIVE

P

Tripartite alignment, where none of A, S, and P align together, is also possible, though rare (Dixon : ). An economical system only needs to distinguish A and P, as these are the only roles that co-occur and thus might be confused. S is the single argument of an intransitive, so it does not co-occur with P or A. Most often, therefore, A and P are coded distinctly and S aligns with one or the other. The 2 Thus, for instance, A and P in German would be defined by the participants of verbs such as er tötete ihn [MS.NOM killed MS.ACC] ‘he killed him’, but a verb which took the same syntactic arguments, even if they weren’t prototypically agent-like or patient-like, would also be considered to take A and P as its arguments, such as er sah ihn [MS.NOM saw MS.ACC] ‘he saw him’. By contrast, the second argument in er folgte ihm [MS.NOM followed MS.DAT] ‘he followed him’ would not be considered to be P, as it is different to the one in er tötete ihn. As Haspelmath makes clear, A, P, and S are most useful as comparative concepts rather than for description: they very often cannot capture the full diversity of grammatical relations within a language.

Alignment of verbal arguments



other logically possible alignment is of A with P, as against S. Functionally this is very inefficient, due to the ambiguity in transitive sentences where both arguments take the same marking. Surprisingly, it is in fact attested, in the case marking system of the Iranian Pamir language, Roshani (also known as Rushan; Payne : –), where it is known as double oblique, and found only in the past tense: ()

Roshani a. duf xawrič-ēn um kitōb these.OBL boy-PL that.OBL book ‘These boys read (past) that book.’ b. dāδ xawrič-ēn-an tar these.ABS boy-PL- to ‘These boys went to Xorog.’ (Payne : )

Xaraɣ Xorog

x̆ēyt read.PST sat go.PST

This system seems, nevertheless, to be unstable and in the process of weakening under influence of the accusative present tense, and Payne analyses it as a stage in the diachronic development from an ergative to an accusative system (Payne : ). .. Semantic/Split-S alignment The alignment patterns described in §.. can all be defined by means of the syntactic concepts, A, S, and P. They can thus be described as types of syntactic alignment. Another kind of alignment is semantic alignment, which cannot be defined by A, S, and P alone. Instead, any definition of a semantic alignment must have recourse to the semantics of the verbal participants or of the verb itself. Consider the following example: ()

Galela (North Halmaheran, Indonesia) a. no-wi-doto A.SG-P.MSG-teach ‘You teach him.’ b. wo-ni-doto A.MSG-P.SG-teach ‘He teaches you.’ c. no-tagi A.SG-go ‘You are going.’ d. ni-kiolo P.SG-be_asleep ‘You are asleep.’ (Holton : )



Alignment

In Galela, the sole argument of some intransitive verbs aligns with P, and the sole argument of others aligns with A. The conditioning factor is whether the verb is stative or dynamic: S arguments of stative verbs align with P; those of other verbs align with A. In descriptions of semantic alignment, an S that aligns with A can be termed SA and an S that aligns with P, SP, regardless of their semantics. The precise conditions behind the SA/SP distinction vary from language to language and typically involve either the semantic role of the argument or the Aktionsart (lexical aspect) of the verb. Primus (: –) predicted that the alignment of an S with A (as SA) or with P (as SP) would be on the basis of several different, though significantly correlated, properties of proto-patients or proto-agents (building on Dowty ). The more proto-patient properties the sole argument of an intransitive predicate had, the more likely it was to be SP; the more proto-agent properties it had, the more likely it was to be SA. Arkadiev (), however, in a survey of five languages with semantic alignment, found that the conditioning in a given language tends to be on the basis of a single one or, at most, a select group of these properties. This property (or group of properties) is decisive in determining the argument of a given intransitive predicate, even if it is outnumbered by properties of the opposite type. The semantic splits Arkadiev identifies are as follows (the first of each pair takes SA encoding): i. dynamic vs stative Aktionsart (e.g. Loma) ii. atelic vs telic (change-of-state) Aktionsart (e.g. Georgian) iii. volitional vs unvolitional action (e.g. Batsbi) – note that it depends not on whether the S referent is able to act volitionally, but whether its action in this particular predicate is volitional. iv. unaffected vs affected S (e.g. Central Pomo, although in this language other properties also play a role) In some languages, the alignment of S is not fixed for each verbal lexeme, but can vary according to the precise meaning in a given predicate. This is known as Fluid-S alignment. Thus, for example, a verb in Batsbi (also known as Bats or Tsova-Tush) which means ‘to fall’ takes an SP argument when the fall is accidental, and SA when it is intentional (Holisky : , ). The property of control or volition is often associated with Fluid-S alignment (Dixon : –). Semantic alignment has sometimes been termed active(-stative) alignment. Wichman (: ) argues that this term should only be used where the S of stative intransitives aligns with P and the S of ‘active’ (i.e. dynamic) intransitives aligns with A. Semantic alignment is also known as ‘Split-S’ alignment, as it is the single argument of intransitive verbs whose behaviour must be defined. ‘Split-S’ as a label has been criticized for defining semantic alignment through a syntactic concept (S) which is only relevant to accusative or ergative alignment (see Wichmann : ). Nevertheless it is difficult to describe semantic alignment without any recourse to the

Alignment of verbal arguments



concept S, or indeed A and P. In the kind of semantic alignment under discussion, the major split occurs among S arguments: not among As or Ps, although separate splits may occur within these categories. A typical description states that one category includes S arguments that have a given property X as well as all A arguments, while the other category includes all S arguments that lack property X as well as all P arguments. How such an alignment can be faithfully defined without mention of S, A, and P is difficult to see. Furthermore, Merlan () showed that in some languages the split is very unbalanced: in some such cases the class of verbs which take an SP is very limited (small or unproductive) and in others the class of verbs which take an SA is the limited one: the latter is the case for some dialects of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic.3 Various authors have argued convincingly that in such cases, one could view the alignment as primarily syntactic, employing terms such as ‘loose ergative alignment’ (Aldai , ), or defining a given split system as having either an ‘accusative base’ or an ‘ergative base’ (Nichols : ; Malchukov : ). Bickel and Nichols (: ) point out that nearly every language has at least some verbs with atypically coded S, and thus the distinction between syntactic and Split-S/semantic alignment is one of degree. Creissels (b: ) points to borderline cases such as French and Occitan, in which ‘a class of verbs characterized by exceptional alignment properties includes just one member’.4 Diachronically it can be very easy for a language to shift from strict syntactic alignment to this kind of semantic alignment (or vice versa). In the North Halmaheran language Galela, simply the loss of the marker of an impersonal agent sufficed to bring about the reanalysis of a P argument as an SP, and a transimpersonal verb as an intransitive (Holton : –; Wichmann : ). Taking all this into consideration, it seems more helpful to view semantic and syntactic alignments as part of a continuum, rather than as discrete categories. This work will employ the term ‘semantic alignment’, as reflecting the conditioning of the argument alignment, but also ‘Split-S’ where convenient. SA and SP likewise remain indispensable terminology in descriptions and comparisons of semantic alignment systems. Unfortunately there is as yet no terminology for the two arguments of semantic alignment (A+SA and P+SP) that is not specific to a particular semantic conditioning: the terms ‘active argument’ and ‘stative argument’ are only appropriate for true active–stative systems, while ‘agentive argument’ and ‘patientive argument’, though perhaps better, may be understood to imply that the split is 3 Creissels (b: –) rightly criticizes the tendency to acknowledge intransitive splits where a small group of verbs align as SA, but to ignore intransitive splits when a small group of verbs align as SP, such as in Russian verbs of the type Menja tošnit [SG.ACC feel_nauseous.PRS.SG] ‘I feel nauseous’. 4 Creissels (b:  n. , , ) identifies an additional problem with the term ‘semantic alignment’ as excluding a priori the possibility of purely lexical, semantically arbitrary splits (see also §..). ‘Semantic alignment’ will be used in this work, but only for cases where the alignment is clearly semantically conditioned.



Alignment

conditioned by the semantic role. Where Split-S alignment rests on only a few atypically aligned intransitives, or shows no easily definable semantic conditioning (but is rather lexically conditioned), it may be more convenient to use the syntactic categories (nominative, accusative, ergative, and absolutive). .. Manifestation of alignment Argument alignment manifests itself in different ways, depending on how grammatical relations are encoded in the language. Within the morphological domain, one common way is the flagging of nominal arguments through case marking or adpositions. Latin and Arabic are languages with accusative case marking, while Basque is an example of an ergatively case-marked language (though some dialects have a degree of semantic alignment). Where alignment is encoded through flagging, in many cases only one argument is marked. The zero-marked case is typically the one including S: in an accusative system it would be the nominative, while in an ergative system it would be the absolutive (Dixon : –). A case used for a core argument is not necessarily unique to that argument. For instance, an ergative marker frequently has other functions, such as instrumental, genitive, or a general oblique (Dixon : ). In the Aramaic case, the preposition used for the ergative is, or was, also used for the dative, and is in fact dative in origin. Another way in which alignment is manifested is the indexing of arguments through person marking on the verb (also known as cross-referencing). Dixon (: –) cites Abaza (North-West Caucasian) and Sacapultec (Mayan) as having ergative cross-referencing. As much of the present work will be about the alignment of personal indexes on the verb, it is useful at this point to examine the typology of indexing and the precise terminology which is appropriate, in particular the terms ‘agreement’, ‘indexing’, and ‘cross-referencing’, which are often used for one and the same phenomenon. Traditionally, many authors have talked of verbs ‘agreeing’ with nominal arguments, but Haspelmath () shows that in many, perhaps most, cases, this is misleading. Take the following examples from North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA), where subject indexing on the verb is obligatory and the verb itself can serve as a sentence, with no need for a noun or free pronoun: ()

North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (Telkepe) a. kalwə k-nox-i dog:PL IND-bark.PRES-NOM.PL ‘The dogs bark.’ b. k-nox-i IND-bark.PRES-PL ‘They bark.’

Alignment of verbal arguments



c. k-yað-ən IND-know.PRES-MS ‘I know.’ (author’s fieldwork) One could say that in (a) the pl. ‑i person affix on the verb agrees with the plural subject kalwə. But then in (b) the same affix is present but there is no nominal argument for it to agree with. If the noun in (a) is the subject argument, where is the subject argument in (b)? If ‑i itself is the subject in (b) then it would be logical to analyse it as such in (a), but then what is kalwə? Linguists have grappled with this problem and failed to reach consensus on a resolution. When the argument is first or second person, as in (c), ‘agreement’ is even less appropriate, as in NENA independent pronouns rarely co-occur with the verb (usually only to mark focus or a change in topic). This kind of system, which Haspelmath calls ‘cross-indexing’, can be contrasted with the system in, for instance, German, where indexing is obligatory but a coreferent nominal (whether noun or independent pronoun) is normally also obligatory: ()

German a. Ich komm-e. / *Komm-e. I come-SG ‘I come.’ b. Er komm-t. / *Komm-t. he come-SG ‘He comes.’

Haspelmath calls this kind of person marking ‘gramm-indexes’. Although well known from some European languages, they are rare cross-linguistically. It is only for this kind of indexing that the concept of agreement works well. A third type of person marking identified by Haspelmath is the ‘pro-index’, where the bound person marking is in complementary distribution with full nominals: ()

Oko (West Benue-Congo) a. àde cìna óbín Ade become king ‘Ade has become a king.’ b. è-cìna óró SG.SBJ-become person ‘He has become renowned (lit. a person).’ (Atoyebi : )

Haspelmath argues that only in this type are indexes clearly actual pronouns, in the sense of standing in for a noun.



Alignment

For most of the Aramaic data presented here, the person markers on the verb are best described as cross-indexes, according to Haspelmath’s definition. Haspelmath argues that such a system should be treated sui generis, rather than squeezed into the agreement model, which only fits the cross-linguistically rare gramm-indexes. Haspelmath’s indexing terminology will therefore be used wherever appropriate in this work. All three types above are termed ‘indexing’, so this term can be used, even when it is not clear precisely what type is under discussion. Croft (: ) uses the term ‘index’ even more broadly, to cover also forms referring to ‘properties other than person’. This would include morphemes encoding only gender and number, such as are found in Aramaic on adjectives, including verbal adjectives. In such cases, I will retain the concept of agreement. When such markers have a default person interpretation, this can become grammaticalized and they can turn into person indexes. This happened, indeed, in Aramaic, where gender/number markers on participles (when not combined with first or second person clitics) turned into third person indexes (see §..). In this work the terms ‘agreement’ and ‘agree with’ will generally only be used for Aramaic when the properties indexed still exclude person, e.g. gender/number agreement on adjectives and participles. It should not be assumed that alignment in indexing is exactly parallel to alignment in flagging (e.g. case marking). In fact, cross-linguistic studies show that different types of alignment have different distributional tendencies in this respect. For instance, semantic/Split-S alignment appears to occur more often in indexing than in case marking, although it can and does occur in case marking, e.g. in Nepali, Georgian, and Basque (Creissels b: –). Bickel et al. (), building on work by Siewierska (), show that alignment in indexing is potentially more complex, as it involves several different phenomena, which may not necessarily show matching alignment: these are Trigger Potential, Form, Position, and Conditions. Trigger Potential concerns which arguments are indexed on the verb and which not (in Bickel et al.’s terms ‘which do and which do not trigger agreement marking’). The Form criterion concerns which arguments share the same phonological form. The Position criterion concerns which arguments are encoded in the same slot relative to the verbal stem or each other (e.g. before or after the verb stem). The Conditions criterion is related to the Trigger Potential, as it concerns which arguments trigger indexing under the same conditions. For some languages, a verb must have either an A or S index, while P is only indexed under certain conditions (differential object indexing), as is indeed the case in Aramaic. A case of mismatch between these criteria might be as follows: A and S both obligatorily trigger indexing (vs P which does not) but are encoded with different index sets. Thus, the Trigger Potential alignment is accusative (A=S6¼P), but for the Form alignment, A6¼S. Cases of mismatch are in fact found in Aramaic, so these criteria should be kept separate in descriptions of its alignment.

Alignment of verbal arguments



Linguists have identified alignment patterns not only in primarily morphological phenomena such as case markers and indexes, but also in the syntactic behaviour of the arguments. Within the clause, one could look for alignment in constituent order, i.e. the positions of A, S, and P in relation to the verb and each other. This is most appropriate for languages such as English in which constituent order is syntactically conditioned. For those languages in which constituent order is conditioned by other factors, such as information structure, it is less appropriate, though it can be attempted, if a default order can be identified. Dixon (: ) points out that an alignment cannot be clearly determined when the verb comes first or last. For instance, if the order is SV/APV, one could argue that S and A align, as both are clause-initial. On the other hand, one could say that S and P align, as both immediately precede the verb. If a language has verb-medial order, then an alignment can in principle be determined, as the two criteria (adjacency to verb, position on edge of clause) do not conflict. Thus the order SV/PVA would be ergatively aligned, as S and P occur in the same position according to both criteria. However, languages with ergative morphology rarely seem to have a verb-medial order, and even tentative examples of ergative word order appear to be few and far between (Dixon : –). Interclausal alignment involves constraints on clause combinations (i.e. under what conditions they can be combined) or on the omission of coreferential arguments in clause combinations. For instance, English allows the omission of a coreferential argument when it and its coreferent are S or A, but not when either or both are P. One can say, ‘Father returned and saw mother’, omitting the ‘he’ in the second clause, but not ‘Father returned and mother saw’, omitting the ‘him’ (Dixon : ). Similarly, if one says ‘Father saw mother and returned’, the (omitted) subject of ‘returned’ must be coreferential with the A of the previous clause, not the P. This is accusative alignment. The Australian language Dyirbal (Pama-Nyungan), on the other hand, has ergative alignment in this respect (Dixon : –, –). In a Dyirbal sentence like ‘Father saw mother and Ø returned’, the subject of ‘returned’ would have to be understood as ‘mother’. The equivalence of arguments in rules of clause combining is called a ‘pivot’. English has an S/A pivot and Dyirbal an S/P pivot. Many languages, however, do not operate with such a pivot, i.e. they have no such constraints in clause combining, or, if there are constraints, they do not relate to syntactic roles. Languages with systematic cross-indexing on the verb (‘head-marking languages’), such as Aramaic, tend to operate without pivot conditions constraining clause combining, although some examples exist (Dixon : ). Overall, ergative alignment in syntax seems to be uncommon: more often accusative alignment is found, or, if there is no pivot, no alignment at all (also known as ‘neutral alignment’). Many languages with ergative morphology do not have ergative syntax (Dixon : ). Semantic alignment can sometimes be identified in syntactic behaviours. For instance, in nominalizations of verbs in some Northern Mande languages, A and



Alignment

P arguments are encoded distinctly, while the S of some verbs aligns with A and that of others aligns with P (Creissels b: , based on Lüpke : –). Note, however, that the intransitive split in many phenomena does not involve alignment with A or P. One such example is auxiliary selection in perfects in Romance and Germanic, where the S of intransitives that take BE cannot be described as aligning with a P in this respect. See Creissels (b) for more detail on types of ‘covert’ split intransitivity. A language will very likely be found to display different alignments in different areas. For example, Laz has semantic alignment in nominal case marking and accusative alignment in verb agreement (Harris and Campbell : ). Basque has ergative (to some degree semantic; see Aldai ) case marking but mostly neutral syntax (Bossong ). Dyirbal has ergative syntax and ergative case marking on nouns, but accusative alignment of pronouns (Dixon : ). So-called ‘ergative languages’, i.e. languages with ergative morphology, in fact usually have accusative or neutral alignment in at least some areas of the language (Dixon : , ). Many languages have an alignment split across tense/aspect lines. This kind of ‘split ergativity’ can be called ‘tense-conditioned alignment’ or ‘tense-sensitive alignment’ (Haig : ). In almost all attested cases of such splits, any ergative alignment is found in a past or perfective construction and the accusative in a nonpast or imperfective (Dixon : ; an exception can be found, however, in Cariban languages—see §.. vi). For instance, Kurmanji Kurdish (Iranian) has ergative case marking only in past tenses, and accusative elsewhere (Bynon : ). Such a tense-conditioned split also developed in Aramaic and forms the subject of this work. Because of the variability in alignment that occurs within languages, it is important not to speak of whole languages having a specific alignment (except in the rare case where there is a single alignment throughout), but rather of the particular alignments of individual systems within a language.

. Pathways of alignment change .. Introduction Alignment is not only an issue of synchronic syntax—how languages encode arguments and how these arguments behave—but also of diachronic syntax. Alignment patterns are not static, but often change over time: an accusative alignment in a language can be replaced by ergative alignment and vice versa. Linguists first recognized this in languages with a long written tradition: some modern languages have ancestral forms5 with a different alignment. For instance, Northern Kurdish 5

This is not to assume that ancient written forms of a language or language family are the direct ancestors of the modern varieties. Nevertheless, there is often enough evidence to suggest that they were similar to the actual ancestors of the modern dialects. In the case of Aramaic, for instance, all of the many

Pathways of alignment change



(Bahdini and Kurmanji, Iranian)6 has ergative alignment in case marking in the past perfective and perfect, but earlier Iranian languages such as Old Persian had accusative alignment throughout (Haig : ). Using a variety of evidence, it has also been possible to postulate paths of alignment change for preliterate stages of languages, such as Polynesian (see, e.g., Hohepa ; Chung , ; Ball ) and prehistoric Sumerian (Coghill and Deutscher ; Schulze and Sallaberger ). Evidence for non-documented change comes from internal evidence in the language itself, cross-linguistic parallels, and, where available, synchronic variation between related dialects or languages, which reflects different stages of development. In examining pathways of alignment change, it is important to take into consideration the precise systems of the language in which the alignment change took place. For instance, alignment change in person indexing on the verb may follow a somewhat different path or occur under different conditions to alignment change in case marking. In Tabassaran, alignment in indexing resulted from the reanalysis of topic copy pronouns (see §.. iii). Such a process would not affect case marking. On the other hand, alignment in indexing may change in step with case marking, if it results from case-marked pronouns becoming bound to the verb. This section will begin by giving an overview of the main pathways of alignment change that have been identified. It is not claimed that these are the only pathways by which alignment change occurs.7 It will then discuss in depth the passive > ergative and possessive > ergative scenarios that have been proposed for Aramaic, presenting the problems with these, and introduce the scenario proposed in this work, namely a reanalysis of a passive participle construction with dative experiencer as an ergative construction. The main types of alignment listed in §. are accusative alignment, ergative alignment, and semantic alignment. Logically the following alignment shifts between these are possible: i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

accusative > ergative ergative > accusative accusative > semantic ergative > semantic semantic > accusative semantic > ergative

attested dialects of the ancient language had accusative alignment, so we expect that the unattested ancestors of those modern dialects showing (some degree of) ergative alignment also had this. 6 The term Kurmanji is sometimes used to cover the dialects of Northern Iraq (Bahdini) as well as those of Turkey, Syria, and the Caucasus. I shall follow Haig (: ) in keeping the two distinct, while using ‘Northern Kurdish’ when referring to both. 7 See also Plank () for an overview of processes and pathways of alignment change.



Alignment

Semantic alignment can be described as an intermediary position between accusative and ergative. This also seems to be the case diachronically, at least in some cases. Thus we might see the shifts below: accusative > semantic > ergative ergative > semantic > accusative A full cycle is also possible: accusative > semantic > ergative > semantic > accusative ergative > semantic > accusative > semantic > ergative .. Accusative > ergative i. Via a passive construction A scenario proposed for this shift involves the reanalysis of a passive with overt agent expressed obliquely. This can happen because the subject of a passive is encoded the same as the subject of an intransitive verb (S). If the subject of the passive (the underlying P)8 is reanalysed as P and the oblique agent as A, then the result is S=P6¼A. In the following representations, letters X, Y, and Z represent distinct morphemes, while the abbreviations in brackets mark the grammatical functions that are expressed by these morphemes, before and after reanalysis: BEFORE REANALYSIS

slave.X(NOM) king.Y(OBL) kill.Z(PASS) ‘The slave is killed by the king.’ slave.X(NOM) dies ‘The slave dies.’

AFTER REANALYSIS

> > > >

king.Y(ERG) slave.X(ABS) kill.Z(ACT) ‘The king kills the slave.’ slave.X(ABS) dies ‘The slave dies.’

Thus the oblique marking is reanalysed as ergative case, the nominative marking as absolutive, and the passive verb as active. There is evidence that the ergative alignment in some Polynesian languages originated in this way (see §.), and the pathway has been proposed also for Iranian languages and Eastern Aramaic (but see §.. ii). It should be noted here that only passive constructions that encode the P of the active clause as the subject of the passive could be involved in such a reanalysis. This is commonly viewed as characteristic of prototypical passives (Siewierska : ), but the term ‘passive’ has also been extended to ‘impersonal passives’, where P may still be encoded as an object (Siewierska : –). This scenario also requires a

8 I use ‘underlying P’ to mean that which would be the P in the active construction. In the passive construction it is S.

Pathways of alignment change



source passive construction that allows the expression of the agent—something which many passive constructions do not do (Siewierska : ). Those passives which do take (oblique) agents are more likely to be favoured over their active equivalents in contexts when the agent is less topic-worthy, i.e. lower on the extended animacy hierarchy:9 – first/second person pronoun – third person pronoun – proper name – [common nouns] human – non-human animate – inanimate – LOWEST (based on Croft : )

HIGHEST

For instance, in English, ‘He was hit by a car’ is preferred to ‘A car hit him’, and ‘She was bitten by a dog’ to ‘A dog bit her’. On this basis, one might expect a reanalysis of such a passive to result in the type of ergativity that is conditioned by the position of the A argument on this hierarchy. In fact, attested cases of such alignment splits do have the ergative marking restricted to referents lower on the extended animacy hierarchy. It may be of relevance here that in many languages ergative markers also function as instrumental markers (Stolz ). This is the case, for instance, in Dyirbal and many other Australian languages (Dixon : ). Instrumental markers naturally occur more often with inanimates (i.e. low on the hierarchy); they also occur in some languages with passives, marking the demoted agent, for instance in Russian. One could imagine a plausible scenario where a passive with an agent low in animacy expressed by an instrumental case could be reanalysed as an ergative restricted to less animate agents:10 king.X(NOM) dog.Y(INS) bite.Z(PASS) ‘The king is bitten by a dog.’

> king.X(ABS) dog.Y(ERG) bite.Z(ACT) > ‘A dog bites the king.’

9 The extended animacy hierarchy is a hierarchy that is frequently found conditioning morphosyntax across languages. It includes not only the animacy hierarchy itself (human–non-human animate– inanimate, as well as finer distinctions) but also a referentiality hierarchy (pronoun–proper name– common noun) and a person hierarchy (first–second–third) (Croft : ). 10 On the other hand, Luraghi (), discussing the syncretism of agent and instrument markers, argues that—outside Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit—the original function is that of agent and the semantic extension is from agent to instrument. The example she gives is of Australian languages, for whose ancestor Dixon (: ) reconstructs an ergative but no instrumental case. She also cites Heine et al.’s (: ) grammaticalization scale, which has agent preceding instrument. However, the shift ergative > instrumental would presumably involve the extension of a syntactic argument marker to an adjunct-marking function—from grammatical to semantic case. A development in the opposite direction would be more expected, as it would follow common diachronic pathways: lexical to grammatical, concrete to abstract. See Blake (: –) on the development from semantic case to grammatical case. Foley (: –) assumes the instrumental > ergative direction of development for the syncretism found in various languages of Papua New Guinea, such as Dani, and also views it as an ‘extension of a peripheral case-marker to a core case’. Here too, the ergative is typically used when the agent is less animate than the patient.



Alignment

ii. Via a possessive predication construction Given that the oblique marker which expresses the agent can also express possession in both Iranian languages and Eastern Aramaic, an alternative hypothesis was proposed, namely that the reanalysis was from a construction predicating possession. This would be possible due to the fact that possession is predicated in these languages not through a transitive verb such as English ‘have’, but through the possessive marking on the possessor, as in the Latin mihi est ‘to me is’, and the possessum is therefore the grammatical subject: king.GEN/DAT (is) slave.NOM ‘To/of the king is a slave’, i.e. ‘The king has a slave.’ In the scenario proposed, the possessor (marked typically as genitive or dative) is reanalysed as the ergative agent: king.Y(GEN/DAT) (is) slave.X(NOM) kill.Z(PTCP) ‘The king has the slave (who is) killed.’ slave.X(NOM) (is) die.Z(PTCP) ‘The slave has died.’

> > > >

king.Y(ERG) slave.X(ABS) kill.Z(ACT.PRF) ‘The king has killed the slave.’ slave.X(ABS) (is) die.Z(ACT.PRF) ‘The slave has died.’

In both the Iranian and Eastern Aramaic cases, the verb of the ergative construction is in a passive participle form. According to the theory, the participle was originally an attribute of the possessum, but became reanalysed as an active verb. This kind of scenario should not be conflated with scenarios involving adnominal possession. Comrie (: ) analyses Old Persian ima tya manā kṛ tam [this which SG.GEN/DAT do.PASS.PTCP] ‘This is what I have done.’ as ‘literally something like “this is the my-having-been-done-thing” ’. This is surely less likely for Persian than the possessive predication scenario: ‘this (is) what I have, done’, although that too has its problems (to be discussed in §.). The possessive predication scenario is definitely distinct from scenarios involving the adnominal possession of verbal nouns (expressing actions) of the type ‘this is my-going’, as discovered in Cariban (see §.. vi), and anticipated in Comrie (: –). iii. Pathways involving a passive/P-oriented participle In considering potential sources of ergative constructions, it is important to differentiate between prototypical dynamic passives on the one hand and ‘stative passives’, often expressed by verbal adjectives (participles), on the other. Such participles are traditionally known as passive participles, but they are at best non-prototypical passives and some linguists do not recognize them as a kind of passive at all, preferring to call them P-oriented participles or simply resultatives (e.g. Haig :

Pathways of alignment change



–; Seržant : ).11 While they differ from canonical, dynamic passives in several ways (for instance, they typically have no direct active counterpart; see §.. for more discussion), a predicated passive participle shares an important property with canonical passives: the P of an active form of the verb is treated as S in the passive participle construction. This is crucial for the development of ergativity, as the category of absolutive is based on the identical treatment of P and S. Passiveness, like other cross-linguistic concepts, is a fuzzy concept, and any boundaries to it will be to some extent arbitrary. I will continue to use the traditional terminology of the ‘passive participle’, while acknowledging its rather marginal membership of the category ‘passive’. Nevertheless, it is important to make a clear distinction between passive/P-oriented participles and canonical passives in any discussion of alignment change. While a canonical passive > ergative shift cannot be ruled out, no such shift has yet been documented in historical sources: textually documented alignment change (such as in Iranian, Indic, and Aramaic) involves only passive/P-oriented participles, not canonical passives.12 This is also the case for the meticulously reconstructed source of the Cariban *t-V-ce ergative system (Gildea : ). It should also be noted that passive/P-oriented participle constructions are probably more prone to reanalysis as active, through having no active counterpart to compete with. For a dynamic passive to be reanalysed as active, the original active must be lost (or shift to a different function). Those cases involving a passive participle, whether interpreted as the reanalysis of a passive or the reanalysis of a possessive predication construction, seem to have a special association with tense-conditioned ergativity where ergativity is found in the past or perfective. This appears to be due to the resultative aspect that passive participles tend to have, which implies a past event. Such participles may easily be reanalysed, via perfects, as pasts or perfectives. It is important, therefore, to differentiate between pathways involving stative/resultative passives and any that involve prototypical dynamic passives. There is no reason to expect that an ergative from a dynamic passive would develop only in the past or perfective.

11 Haspelmath (), in his discussion of ‘passive participles’, uses the terminology P-oriented and A-oriented, but retains a distinction between P-oriented participles, which can be formed not only from transitive verbs but also from ‘unaccusative’ intransitives such as ‘die’ (thus are actually oriented to P and SP), and ‘passive participles in the strict sense’, which can only be formed from transitives (and are thus only oriented to P). The ‘passive participle’ in earlier Eastern Aramaic would be a true passive participle under Haspelmath’s definition, as it was almost entirely restricted to transitive verbs: other participles could be used with intransitives (§.). The resultative participles of Old Persian were P-oriented in Haspelmath’s definition, i.e. P/S-oriented, as they could also be derived from intransitives (Haig : ). This distinction is, however, not crucial for the development of ergativity. Whether intransitive participles have the same form as passive participles or a different one, in either case the underlying P is treated as a subject like S, when such a participle is predicated. 12 I thank Ilja Seržant for a helpful discussion of the definition and status of these participles. The opinions expressed here are my own.



Alignment

The passive and possessive scenarios that involve a passive participle, being especially relevant to the Aramaic case, will be treated in depth in §. and Chapter . iv. Via an inverse construction An inverse construction is a construction which promotes (functionally, occasionally syntactically) a non-agent in a transitive clause (Thompson : ). Such a construction is used when the non-agent ranks higher in topic-hood or in topicworthiness (i.e. on the extended animacy hierarchy). The arguments may be formally marked as ‘proximate’ (topical) or ‘obviative’ (less topical), and the verb will be marked for direct or inverse voice: in the direct voice the A will be the proximate, while in the inverse it will be the obviative. Such constructions are common in the Algonquian languages of North America, but are also found in other parts of the world. The function of inverses is similar to that of passives, with the crucial difference that in an inverse construction the demoted agent is still a syntactic argument, not an adjunct as in the passive (Siewierska b). It is also not necessarily low in absolute topicality, but rather only in relation to the other argument (Givón : ). The following examples show direct and inverse voice in Plains Cree: ()

Plains Cree (Algonquian) a. sekih-ew napew antim-wa scare-DIR man:PROX dog-OBV ‘The man scares the dog.’ b. sekih-ik napew-a antim scare-INV man‑OBV dog:PROX ‘The man[FOC] scares the dog.’ or: ‘The dog is scared by the man.’ (Wolfart : , as glossed in Siewierska : )

Givón () suggests that ergatives have developed from inverse constructions, citing languages where ergativity is conditioned by the position of the agent on an animacy hierarchy. He suggests that inverse constructions are a more likely direct source of ergatives than passives, as they have more in common with them: the A argument retains some degree of topicality, it is usually obligatory, and it is already a syntactic argument. As inverse constructions may apparently develop out of passives (Givón : –), this analysis would not rule out an ultimate origin in a passive, in a shift passive > inverse > ergative. Siewierska (), on the other hand, points out that only ‘promotional’ inverse constructions, i.e. those which promote the P to subject, are likely to be reanalysed as ergative, and that such inverses are actually in the minority cross-linguistically. Canonical inverse > ergative would be possible, however, if there was no overt marking of arguments (except the obviative in the inverse). In the inverse the agent

Pathways of alignment change



would be marked as obviative: this could be reanalysed as ergative and the zero marking (on S and P) as absolutive. She outlines a scenario in which an inverse could lead to ergative alignment in case marking on nouns, but not pronouns (i.e. the commonly found split along the extended animacy hierarchy). The conditions for this are accusative marking of pronouns, no overt marking of nouns in direct voice, and obviative marking of the A (whether noun or pronoun) in the inverse. This could be reanalysed as ergative case marking on nouns and tripartite alignment of pronouns. The latter would come about because P would retain its distinctive marking, while A would now be marked by the ergative ( > > >

dog.Y(ERG) man.Ø(ABS) kill.Z(ACT) ‘The dog kills the man.’ man.Ø(ABS) dies ‘The man dies.’

As for ergative cross-indexing, this could not develop from a canonical (nonpromotional) inverse, as it requires P to trigger the same indexes as S—something which is the case for canonical (promotional) passives but not canonical inverses (Siewierska : ). Ergative cross-indexing could in principle develop from a promotional inverse, but these are rarer. Siewierska (: ) also argues that ergativity conditioned by tense/aspect favours a passive source, because of the semantic similarity that holds between the passive (more precisely stative passive) and the perfect but not between the inverse and the perfect. Thus, it seems the shift inverse > ergative is possible only under very restricted conditions. There is, however, some evidence for such a shift: Gildea (: –) argues that one of the ergative systems of the Cariban languages developed from a passive via an inverse, on the basis of synchronic variation among the languages. The inverse stage, apparently preserved in the Carib of Surinam, he diagnoses as such because the agent is virtually obligatory (unlike in passives—but this could also be true of an ergative), while ‘the topicality profile of the agent and patient . . . fit exactly the profile of the inverse voice’ (Gildea : ). We will not need to pursue this pathway further in any case, as there is no evidence at all for inverse alignment in the history of Aramaic. The Neo-Aramaic personal indexes on the verb, the S- and L‑suffixes, do show an inversion of roles (§.), but this is not conditioned by animacy (as in inverse alignment), but rather by tense/ aspect. v. Via the reanalysis of an instrumental as ergative in a clause with zero-marked subject Garrett () proposes a scenario whereby a noun phrase with instrumental marking is reanalysed in a transitive clause as the ergative. He shows that this would only be likely where the original subject was not overtly expressed, so that



Alignment

the instrumental/ergative could easily take its place. He provides evidence that this occurred in Hittite, involving an ablative with an instrumental function, and suggests it also for the Eastern Highlands language family of Papua New Guinea. As instruments tend to be inanimate (see §.. i), this scenario is a good fit for ergative systems conditioned by the position of the A on the animacy hierarchy. The reanalysis would take place as follows: Ø(SG.NOM) purifies it.Y(ACC) water.Z(INS) ‘S/he purifies it with water.’

> purifies it.Y(ABS) water.Z(ERG) ‘Water purifies it.’

This scenario shows clearly how an (inanimate) A would become distinct from S. What Garrett does not show is how P would align with S, a crucial diagnostic of ergativity. If P is accusatively marked, then it will still be distinct from the S of intransitive clauses, and the result would be tripartite alignment. Garrett’s scenario would therefore require some further change, or for accusatives not to be casemarked in the original system. vi. Via a nominalization as part of a periphrastic verb form Another pathway from accusative to ergative involves the reanalysis of a nominalization, such as has been reconstructed by Gildea (, ) for Cariban languages. Proto-Cariban had accusatively aligned indexing on the verb and no case marking on subjects or objects. When verbs were nominalized, however, the S and P arguments were treated the same and the A argument differently: if pronominal, S and P were expressed by means of possessive suffixes; A was additionally marked with a dative postposition. Thus the first person pronouns in ‘my going’ and ‘my catching the bird’ were encoded differently, while the first person pronouns in ‘my going’ and ‘catching me/my being caught’ would be expressed the same. Such nominalizations were incorporated into clauses of the type ‘It (is/was) my going’, involving a pleonastic pronoun. This clause was reanalysed as meaning ‘I am/was going’13 (Gildea : –), so that the ‘possessor’ of the action was reanalysed as an argument of a finite clause. The following examples still clearly show the origin: ()

Apalaí a. y-ɨto-rɨ moro -go-NMLZ that ‘I was going’ (lit. ‘That is/was my going.’) (Koehn and Koehn : , as cited in Gildea : )

13 In equative clauses such as these, the copula may be omitted (Koehn and Koehn ), leaving the tense also unmarked.

Pathways of alignment change



b. a-ɨto-rɨ ropa moro isawã pona -go-NMLZ again that sand to ‘He is going to the beach.’ (lit. ‘That is/was his going . . . ’) (Koehn and Koehn : , transcription adapted) A later stage, after the reanalysis, can be seen in the related language Makushi, where the cognate construction expresses an imperfective (Gildea : ). Possessed nominalizations do not inherently lead to ergativity. If the possessors of nominalizations were aligned accusatively (cf. English ‘my going’ and ‘my catching’, where ‘my’ encodes S or A, but not P), the alignment of the reanalysed verbal construction would also have been accusative. The development in Cariban resulted in tense-conditioned alignment with ergativity in future/present/imperfective tenses and accusative alignment (the older system) in the past tense (Gildea : –). This goes against the cross-linguistic tendency for ergativity to occur in the past/perfective in tense-conditioned alignment, demonstrating that this is indeed a tendency, rather than a universal.

.. Ergative > accusative i. Via an antipassive Antipassive voice is found in some languages with ergativity. Like the passive it converts a bivalent verb (a verb taking two arguments) into a monovalent one. The antipassive does this by omitting the P argument. The resulting verb is, strictly speaking, intransitive, and the antipassive treats it as such. Hence, what would be the A argument in the ergative construction is treated as an S argument, i.e. in absolutive case. Just as a passive can in many languages take an overt agent expressed obliquely (with a non-core case or adposition), so too can the antipassive in some languages take an object expressed obliquely, as in the following example from Chuchki (Chukotko-Kamchatkan): ()

Chuchki a. (transitive) ʔaaček-a kimitʔ-ən ne-nlʔete-ən youth-ERG load-ABS PL-carry-AOR.SG ‘The young men carried away the load.’ b. (antipassive) ʔaaček-ət ine-nlʔetet-gʔe-t kimitʔ-e youth-ABS ANTIP-carry-AOR.SG-PL load-INS ‘The young men carried away a load.’ (Kozinsky et al. : , cited in Polinsky )



Alignment

Various functions for antipassives have been described. Firstly they can be used to allow the omission of the P argument (just as a passive can allow the omission of A). Even when the underlying P argument14 is expressed, antipassives have functions distinct from canonical transitives. Dixon (: –) shows that in Dyirbal the use of an antipassive avoids the difficulties caused by Dyirbal’s strict syntactic S/P pivot. Alternatively the oblique marking of the underlying P argument may reflect a lesser degree of affectedness, similar to English ‘shoot at X’, rather than ‘shoot X’, or a lesser degree of individuation (Polinsky ). Where an antipassive has an oblique object, the result is in effect accusative alignment. The underlying A argument is coded the same as S, and P differently to S. Antipassives are frequently associated with imperfective aspect (Polinsky ). Hence accusative alignment achieved via an antipassive is frequently restricted to imperfective aspect or present tense. The tense-conditioned split resulting from the reanalysis of an antipassive with obliquely marked patient is thus identical to that reached via the reanalysis of a passive with obliquely marked agent: accusative alignment in imperfective/present and ergative in perfective/past. The ergative to accusative shift via antipassive occurs typically along the following lines: Ergative construction king.X(ERG) slave.Y(ABS) kill.PFV ‘The king killed the slave.’ slave.Y(ABS) die.PFV ‘The slave died.’ Antipassive construction king.Y(ABS) kill.IPFV slave.Z(OBL) ‘The king is killing a slave.’ slave.Y(ABS) die.IPFV ‘The slave is dying.’

> king.Y(NOM) kill.IPFV slave.Z(ACC) > slave.Y(NOM) die.IPFV

An antipassive construction with the underlying P marked obliquely is inherently accusatively aligned. This accusative analysis is represented in the example by changing the labels to nominative and accusative. If there is special antipassive marking, this may be reanalysed; otherwise no particular reanalysis is necessary. Harris (: –) and Harris and Campbell (: –) describe such a development in Georgian, where an antipassive construction developed for imperfective aspect. A shift from ergative to accusative alignment via an antipassive is also proposed for the Pama-Nyungan language Lardil, on the basis of evidence from related languages (Klokeid , see also summaries in Dixon : , ; Harris

14

I.e. the argument which would be P in the active construction.

Pathways of alignment change



and Campbell : –). Aldai () explains irregularities in Basque person indexing on the verb through reconstructing a prehistoric stage of Basque where antipassive imperfective constructions had accusative alignment. See also Schulze () for a detailed treatment of possible cases of antipassive > accusative shift. ii. Via an analytical verb form involving an intransitive auxiliary In principle, a new analytical verb form involving an intransitive auxiliary, such as a copula, should result in S=A, as both will be encoded as the (absolutive) single arguments of the intransitive auxiliary. (This scenario would also work where predication occurs without a copula.) The lexical verb might be in the form of a verbal noun or participle or another finite verb form. In such constructions, the P might be encoded obliquely, and the construction could then be identified as a type of antipassive. Constructions with progressive or continuous aspect often develop out of analytical verb forms involving intransitive verbs (e.g. ‘be’, ‘sit’, ‘stand’: see Heine and Kuteva : ), and later develop into general imperfectives, so this could in part explain the antipassive–imperfective connection. This scenario might occur along the following lines: king.Y(ABS) (is) in-killing slave.Z(OBL) ‘The king is killing the slave.’ slave.Y(ABS) (is) in-dying ‘The slave is dying.’

> king.Y(NOM) (is) in-killing slave.Z(ACC) > slave.Y(NOM) (is) in-dying

See Creissels (a: –) for more detail on the scenario of progressive periphrases. He points out that it is necessary for a biclausal construction to be reanalysed as a single clause before this can be viewed as accusative alignment. In a biclausal construction, the subject is the subject of the intransitive auxiliary, regardless of the transitivity of the verbal noun, and so it is perfectly explicable for it to take absolutive case within an ergative system. It may, however, be difficult to identify precisely when such a reanalysis has taken place. iii. Via the reanalysis of topic copy pronouns as person indexing on the verb The following is based on Harris and Campbell (: –), who draw their data from Magometov (). Proto-Northeast Caucasian (Daghestanian) had ergative case marking, as does its descendent Tabassaran. In Pre-Tabassaran, topical nominals triggered indexing by clitic pronouns on the verb. S and A are more often topics than P, so it was S and A that most often triggered indexing, and S/A indexing became obligatory. At this stage the trigger potential (see §..) was already accusatively aligned. Initially these clitics preserved ergative/absolutive marking (so were ergatively aligned in form), but in the northern dialect, the distinction was lost (presumably by analogy with the independent pronouns, which had already lost the distinction). This may have happened gradually, via the extension of ergative marking to SA verbs, a stage



Alignment

which is in fact preserved in the southern dialects (Siewierska : , n.  [p. ]; Kibrik : –). As a result, in the northern dialect, S and A are indexed obligatorily and identically, differently to P, creating fully accusative alignment in indexing. .. Tense-conditioned alignment arising via new constructions Some of the developments described in §§..– involve a specific construction. This is the case for the developments involving reanalysed passive or possessive constructions, verbal periphrases involving ergatively aligned nominalizations, and accusatively aligned antipassives (but not necessarily for developments involving topic copy pronouns, which could potentially apply to any construction). Initially, such constructions may be marginal; later they may become more common and play a bigger role in the verbal system. In such cases, the old alignment will still be found in the other constructions of the language (e.g. in other tense–aspect–mood constructions), and as a result there may be tense-conditioned alignment. In one sense, there has been no change in alignment: the older constructions retain their alignment pattern. There has simply been the addition of a new alignment pattern through the emergence of a new construction. Of course, more fundamental change may occur if the old constructions with the original alignment disappear. Creissels (a: –) highlights the role that auxiliaries may play in introducing a new alignment, given that ‘the coding characteristics of the arguments of the auxiliated verb are not necessarily the same as in a simple independent clause headed by the same verb’. For example, in an ergative system, a construction involving an intransitive auxiliary may, when combined with a transitive lexical verb, result in accusative alignment (as in §.. ii). Two pathways involving valency reduction strategies, namely the shifts from ergative > accusative via an antipassive construction and accusative > ergative via a passive participle construction, both frequently result in tense-conditioned alignment. It is interesting to note that in both cases the ergative alignment is then found in perfective or past-tense constructions and the accusative alignment in imperfective or present-tense constructions. For such kinds of split alignment, therefore, there are at least two possible explanations: one where the ergative alignment is the innovation and the other where it is the accusative alignment which is new. Indeed, for the development of tense/aspect-conditioned alignment in Sumerian, both have been adduced (see Coghill and Deutscher ; Schulze and Sallaberger ). .. Shift from tense-conditioned to consistent alignment Tense-conditioned alignment may shift to consistent alignment throughout the tenses. This can occur if the old constructions fall into disuse (or indeed if the new construction does). Alternatively, the new alignment may be extended to the old tenses by analogy. The latter has occurred in Laz (Kartvelian), where ergative/

Pathways of alignment change



semantic alignment has been generalized across the tenses (Harris : ; Anderson : ; Comrie b: ). In the Orošori Pamir language (Iranian), the generalization has taken place in the opposite direction: the case system of the present tense, which is accusatively aligned, has been generalized to the past tense, which previously had double oblique alignment (Payne : , §..). Accusative alignment has also been generalized from the present tense to the past tense in Modern Persian (§.). The alignment which becomes generalized may be either the newer one (in which case a complete shift of alignment takes place) or the older one, in which case there is a complete reversion to the original alignment. Force of analogy may work alongside other motivations: for instance, the shift may take place via semantic alignment, in which case it could involve the reanalysis of transimpersonals or light verb constructions (see §§..–). .. Accusative > semantic alignment via demotion/suppression of agent Malchukov () outlines a route from accusative to semantic alignment via the reanalysis of transimpersonals with experiencer objects as intransitives with the experiencer as the sole argument. A transimpersonal is a transitive verb where the agent is impersonal, such as the following examples: ()

Amharic a. rabä-ñ make_hungry.PFV.NOM.SG-ACC.SG ‘I am hungry’ (lit. ‘it made me hungry’) (Creissels a: , from Leslau : ) Russian b. Menja trjasët (ot lixoradki) SG.ACC shake.PRS.SG (from fever.GEN) ‘I am shaking (with fever)’ (lit. ‘it shakes me [from fever]’) (Creissels a: )

If the agent is not overt (perhaps because third persons are zero-marked) or it is dropped, then the experiencer can be reanalysed as the single argument of the verb. Thus a P is reanalysed as S, while retaining its P morphology. A partial example for this is German mich friert, where the usual expletive A es ‘it’ is not required, though the ms. indexing remains: ()

German mich frier-t SG.ACC freeze-SG ‘I am freezing’ (lit. ‘me freezes’)

The change in alignment via transimpersonals occurs along the following lines. The accusative marking on the experiencer argument of a transimpersonal is



Alignment

reanalysed as SP, i.e. ‘patientive’ case. Other S arguments continue to be encoded like an A, i.e. as SA, in ‘agentive’ case: king.X(ACC) froze(TR) Ø(it.NOM) ‘The king froze.’ king.Y(NOM) departed(INTR) ‘The king departed.’ king.Y(NOM) killed(TR) slave.X(ACC) ‘The king killed the slave.’

> king.X(PAT) froze(INTR) > king.Y(AG) departed(INTR) > king.Y(AG) killed(TR) slave.X(PAT)

As for the motivation for such a reanalysis, experiencers have properties both of typical agents (animacy and hence topic-worthiness) and of typical patients (in undergoing a change of state). Malchukov argues that the P of experiential transimpersonals is reanalysed as S (resulting in SP) under pressure ‘to syntactically upgrade the experiencer, which is the most discourse-pragmatically prominent argument’ (Malchukov : ). At the same time, he argues, there is pressure to syntactically demote or suppress a non-prominent (e.g. indefinite-unspecific, inanimate, or cognate) subject, such as is typical of transimpersonals. Malchukov shows that the reanalysis of such a transimpersonal as an intransitive with an SP argument is only likely under certain conditions, namely where the object is indexed on the verb and where a third person agent is not. (There are, however, cases where the third person agent was initially indexed, but lost during the reanalysis.) Such a reanalysis cannot bring about semantic alignment in an ergative language, as S is aligned with P in any case, so a transimpersonal reanalysed as an intransitive, with P reanalysed as S, would look no different to other intransitives in the language. A further requirement is that experiencers in the language may be treated as P, i.e. encoded as accusatives. If experiencers are treated as R, i.e. encoded as datives, then even if the experiencer is reanalysed as a single argument, the result will be a class of SR predicates, not SP predicates. Wichmann (: –) states, ‘In languages having indirect objects, experiencers will tend to treated [sic] as datives, which is why such languages (e.g. Icelandic, treated by Donohue) do not develop canonical semantic alignment.’ In fact, some languages encode experiencers with both datives and accusatives. For instance, German has mir ist kalt [SG.DAT is cold] ‘I am cold’ and mich friert [SG.ACC freeze.SG] ‘I’m freezing’. It is not impossible for languages with indirect objects to develop canonical semantic (Split-S) alignment via transimpersonal constructions, as long as at least some experiencers are encoded as accusatives. Malchukov () and Mithun () show convincing evidence that semantic alignment arose via transimpersonals in many indigenous languages of North America, such as Dakota, as well as Papuan languages, such as Galela. In a language that has acquired semantic alignment via transimpersonals, it is not necessarily the case that each and every verb with an SP argument developed via a

Pathways of alignment change



transimpersonal. Malchukov (: ) points out, as did Dixon (: ), that further verbs could be added to the SP class by analogy. Malchukov (: ) argues that this in fact happened in certain Eskimo languages, such as Siberian Yupik. Language contact may play a role in this development. Mithun (: –) argues that contact may have promoted the reanalysis of transimpersonals among the diverse indigenous languages of the Southeast region of the United States. .. Accusative > semantic alignment via extension Plank () presents several cases where accusative coding (or syntactic behaviour associated with objects) is extended to some types of intransitive core argument. One is the Finnic partitive case, which is used in a kind of differential object marking, but was also extended to certain Ss (Itkonen ). Another is the Latin accusative case, which in some late texts is frequently found on the single argument of intransitive (mostly passive) verbs. To this type may be added the case of the Ancient Hebrew differential object marker ʔɛt̠-, which is also occasionally extended to the single argument of passives and other intransitives, more rarely to the A of transitive verbs. In an examination of the phenomenon, Hasselbach (: –) explains this as two developments: the development of impersonal passives, where the patient is not promoted, and the increasing use of ʔɛt̠- as a deictic and then as a topic marker. In such cases the semantics and pragmatics of the argument play a significant role in conditioning the extension. In Latin and Hebrew it seems that the extended accusative occurs predominantly (and thus perhaps initially) with passives. In both languages, too, the extended accusative argument is topical: Plank explains this correlation as resulting from the association with the passive: patients tend to be expressed in passive constructions when they are topical. The extended accusative scenario may occur as follows: The canonical passive construction: this slave.Y(NOM) burn(PASS) ‘This slave is to be burnt.’ acquires an accusatively marked argument: this slave.X(ACC) burn(PASS) ‘This slave is to be burnt.’

> slave.X(PAT) burn(PASS)

which is also extended to some intransitive verbs: slave.X(ACC) fall(INTR) to_his_share ‘The slave will fall to his share.’

> slave.X(PAT) fall(INTR) to_his_share

but not all intransitives, nor to transitives: king.Y(NOM) departed(INTR) ‘The king departed.’

> king.Y(AG) departed(INTR)



Alignment

king.Y(NOM) killed(TR) slave.X(ACC) ‘The king killed the slave.’

> king.Y(AG) killed(TR) slave.X(PAT)

A somewhat different case presented by Plank (: –) is early modern Spanish word order, where certain intransitive core arguments appear after the verb, like objects. The mechanism of the extended accusative is a complex one, if indeed it is a unified phenomenon, and deserves further investigation. .. Ergative > semantic alignment via demotion/suppression of object As might be expected, the route to semantic alignment from ergative alignment is different to that from accusative alignment. Various pathways have been identified, but what they have in common is an originally transitive construction in which the object is incorporated or omitted, becoming in effect intransitive but retaining the transitive encoding. Alternatively expressed, the source constructions ‘have in common that they are formally transitive, but also have properties of intransitives’ (Harris and Campbell : ). One such route takes place via light verb constructions where the main lexical meaning is contained in a P argument nominal, such as English to have fun. If the P argument is reanalysed as part of the verb, especially (but not only) if the two are morphologically merged, the verb may be reanalysed as intransitive, while the now single argument, S, continues to be encoded the same way as an A. Such a development took place in Basque (Aldai : –), in Lezgian (Haspelmath : ), and in Kartvelian languages such as Georgian (Harris and Campbell : –), among others: below are some examples. Note that in Lezgian, the absolutive P is sometimes merged with the light verb: both the merged and the non-merged forms are possible. ()

()

Basque Peru-k dantza-Ø Peter-ERG dance-ABS ‘Peter has danced.’ (Aldai : )

egin done

Lezgian a. Ada k’walax iji-zwa. she.ERG work do-IPFV ‘She is doing work.’ b. Ada k’walax-zawa. she.ERG work-IPFV ‘She is working.’ (Haspelmath : )

du. has

Pathways of alignment change



Other transitive constructions that may easily be reanalysed as intransitive are predicates with a P that is a body part or cognate with the verb. Such constructions, in addition to light verb constructions, were reanalysed as intransitives in Georgian (Harris : –, : –; Harris and Campbell : –). Examples of the three types include ‘to do pity’ (= ‘to pity’), ‘to fast a fast’ (= ‘to fast’), and ‘to look up the eyes’ (= ‘to look up’). In Old Georgian the P argument is sometimes morphologically merged with the verb and sometimes not. Semantic alignment via these kinds of reanalysis occurs along the following lines. The absolutive P is reanalysed as part of the verb (and possibly formally incorporated into the verb) or omitted. The verb is reanalysed as having a single argument, S, which retains the same coding as A, creating a class of SA predicates. The ergative coding is reanalysed as agentive (A+SA), and the absolutive as patientive (P+SP). king.X(ERG) killed(TR) slave.Y(ABS) ‘The king killed the slave.’ king.X(ERG) did(TR) dancing.Y(ABS) ‘The king danced.’ king.Y(ABS) departed(INTR) ‘The king departed.’

> king.X(AG) killed(TR) slave.Y(PAT) > king.X(AG) did-dancing(INTR) > king.Y(PAT) departed(INTR)

Such a development cannot occur in a strict ergative system (Aldai ). In strict ergative alignment, when a normally transitive verb occurs with an incorporated P argument or with the P omitted, the agent is encoded with the absolutive: ()

Tongan a. Naʔe

ʔa

PST

ABS

haka ʔe he sianá cook ERG the man ‘The man cooked a fish.’

e the

ika. fish

haka-ika ʔa e sianá. cook-fish ABS the man ‘The man cooked fish.’ (Chung : , cited in Harris : )

b. Naʔe PST

The same rule would apply when there is an oblique (e.g. dative) argument instead of a P. Harris (: –) distinguishes between such strict ergative alignment, based purely on the actual transitivity of the given predicate, and ‘restricted ergative’ alignment, where the alignment depends on the normal transitivity of the verb, and thus is lexically fixed. She argues that, though Proto-Kartvelian is reconstructed as having strict ergative alignment, this became ‘restricted ergative’ in Old Georgian, as the object incorporation constructions were developed (Harris : –). This can also be seen in the use of ergative marking when object pronouns were omitted



Alignment

(Harris : –) and when certain transitive verbs were used with reflexive function: ()

a. The mother-ERG bathed the child-ABS b. The mother-ERG bathed (i.e. herself)

Aldai () shows that the alignment system of Old Basque (documented from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries) was already of the restricted type, which he terms ‘loose ergative’, and that this was crucial for the development of semantic alignment in Modern Western Basque. In loose/restricted ergative alignment, the reanalysis of a construction with an incorporated or suppressed P argument as intransitive would not lead to the single argument taking absolutive coding. Transitive verbs used intransitively, i.e. with no overt object, would still be treated as transitive: ()

a. The man-ERG ate the apple-ABS b. The man-ERG ate

Basque is unusual in having both historical data and documentation of dialectal variation. These both show a gradual move from loose ergative alignment (Old Basque, still preserved in Modern Eastern Basque), via a less ergative system (preserved in Modern Central Basque), to semantic alignment in Modern Western Basque, where even non-complex verbs take SA arguments. The semantic classes of SA verbs in Western Basque are: non-volitional inanimate activities (e.g. ‘flash’, ‘boil’), agentive verbs of manner of motion (e.g. ‘run’, ‘dance’), agentive verbs of human activities (e.g. ‘fight’, ‘play’), speech verbs (e.g. ‘speak’), and meal verbs (e.g. ‘have lunch’). Already in Old Basque there is evidence for loose ergativity. Light verb constructions with egin ‘to do’ took an ergative argument, as they do in modern dialects. Aldai, however, does not count these as cases of true SAs. Even in modern Basque they are still not incorporated and the process of their lexicalization is not far advanced. In short, they still behave more or less like canonical transitive verbs (Aldai : –). Nevertheless, Aldai suggests that the trend towards a semantic system may have been aided by the presence of ergative arguments in semantically similar (‘unergative’) light verb constructions (: ). It would also have been aided by the presence of predicates involving an ergative and a dative argument (: –). It seems, therefore, that in a loose ergative system there were predicates that took transitive coding, even though they could in some way be analysed as intransitive (whether P was omitted, replaced by an oblique, or simply semantically part of the verb). It was easier in a loose system than in a strict ergative system for other intransitives with agentive arguments to take the same coding as A, as analogy could come into play.

Pathways of alignment change



Analogy has also played a role in the development of semantic alignment in other languages. Harris and Campbell (: ) note that in Kartvelian languages not all of the SA verbs appeared in the source constructions described above. They conclude that the use of the agentive coding was extended to other verbs. Harris (: ) elaborates that force of analogy caused the extension of ergative marking to other verbs of the same (in her view innate) class of unergatives. We saw in §.. that transimpersonal constructions could only lead to semantic alignment from the starting point of an accusative system. Conversely the scenarios described above, involving the demotion or suppression of a P argument, can only lead to semantic alignment from the starting point of an ergative system. Within an accusative system S is already encoded like A, so if a light verb construction is reanalysed as intransitive, and its A argument as an S with A-coding, there is no change. It will be argued in §. that in Eastern Aramaic loose ergative alignment developed into semantic/Split-S alignment via an extension of A-coding to the sole argument of certain intransitive verbs on the basis of aspect and Aktionsart. A split based mainly on Aktionsart can still be seen in Ṭ uroyo and those NENA dialects which have not shifted fully to accusative alignment: these preserve a minority SA class of mainly atelic verbs. There is no evidence that this development occurred in NENA through light verb or similar constructions. Given that languages in the region have semantic alignment with very similar conditions, contact may have played a role. .. Similarities and differences between the pathways from syntactic to semantic alignment Creissels (a: –) identified commonalities between two routes towards semantic alignment, namely the demotion/omission of A via the reanalysis of a transimpersonal construction and the demotion/omission of P via the reanalysis of a light verb construction (and the like). In both cases there is ellipsis of an argument (whether A or P), resulting in the reanalysis of the predicate as having a single argument (S). In both cases too, the original coding of this argument is retained, leading to a new coding of S in the predicates involved. As mentioned in §.., these two routes differ in their starting point. Transimpersonals can only lead to semantic alignment from the starting point of an accusative system, while light verb constructions and the like can only lead to semantic alignment from an ergative starting point. Another difference lies in the relative size of the SP and SA classes. As Merlan () showed (§..), semantic alignment is often imbalanced, with either a small group of SP verbs or a small group of SA verbs. In the transimpersonal scenario, we can expect that the minor group will be the SP class, at least initially; in the light verb construction scenario, the minor group should be the SA class.



Alignment

Of course, this situation does not have to remain static. In either case, the minor group may expand to create a more balanced semantic system by simply extending the coding properties of the minor group to more intransitive lexemes. Alongside the shift in proportions, a shift may also occur in the precise semantic conditioning of the split (Malchukov : ). As we saw in §.., this can be conditioned by the semantics of the S argument or the lexical aspect of the predicate. Mithun (: –) outlines a shift in Iroquoian from a split conditioned by the semantic role of the S argument to one conditioned by the lexical aspect of predicate. Split‑S might even be achieved simply by the mechanism of extension, without the reanalysis of a transitive construction as intransitive (§..). This may be motivated by semantic/pragmatic characteristics that certain Ss share with Ps. In the shift from ergative to semantic alignment, the extension mechanism probably cannot be independent of the ‘suppression of the object’ mechanism (§..), given that intransitive verbs whose core arguments are semantically most like As, such as verbs meaning ‘dance’ or ‘sing’, are often in fact ambitransitive or may at least imply a possible object. Creissels (a: , b: ) argues that not all splits in S-marking are semantically conditioned and that purely lexical, semantically arbitrary splits may arise through historical accident. While in principle historical accidents can result in systems that are not semantically or functionally motivated,15 nevertheless the historical developments themselves are frequently semantically motivated and hence result in semantically conditioned distributions. For instance, transimpersonal constructions do not arise with semantically arbitrary types of predicates, but rather are commonly found with predicates of certain semantic fields, such as those involving an experiencer. SP-marked intransitives that develop from transimpersonals will tend to have similar semantics, at least initially. It may well also be the case that constructions which demote, omit, or incorporate P (e.g. light verb constructions) tend also to develop among verbs of particular semantics, and this could also result in semantically conditioned Split-S alignment. Creissels (a: ), following Trask (: ), suggests Basque is a case of a semantically arbitrary split resulting from ‘a collection of historical accidents’, arguing that verbs such as ‘boil’ taking ergative case cannot be viewed as agentive. Aldai (, ), however, finds common semantics between the SA verbs of Western Basque. Of course, having shared semantic characteristics does not imply that assignment to one class or another is entirely predictable. A clearer example of an arbitrary split may be 15 For example, North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects show a gender distinction in first person singular indexing on Present Base (but not Past Base) verbs. This appears to have little functional use, and can be explained as a historical accident: the Present Base forms developed out of active participles, which like other adjectives in Aramaic inflect for gender and number. The gender morpheme has been preserved in the first person (as in the second and third person) indexes in most dialects, though the distinction is being lost in others (e.g. the Christian Barwar dialect; Khan a: –).

Pathways of alignment change



found in Cariban languages, where Split-S has developed through light verb constructions without any clear semantic conditioning, at least of the types which have hitherto been recognized (Meira ). While Creissels is correct that we should not assume all splits are semantically conditioned, nevertheless it seems that in most cases some kind of semantic conditioning can be identified. A possible shared motivation underlying the processes leading to semantic alignment may be the desire to promote an animate and thus topic-worthy argument to a syntactic status more associated with these characteristics. We saw in §.. how this could motivate the reanalysis of an experiencer P as an S (though still with P-coding). This could also be the motivation behind the encoding of certain animate S arguments like A, whether by the adoption of constructions (such as light verb constructions) which enable this, or whether directly through the extension of A coding to such S arguments. .. Semantic > syntactic (accusative or ergative) alignment i. (Ergative > ) semantic > accusative through extension Pustet (: –, –) argues on the basis of data from two Siouan languages that the relative size of SA and SP groups may alter over time and that such a quantitative shift could be a path in alignment change. For instance, if the class of intransitive predicates taking SA encoding or behaviour grows, eventually all S arguments may align with A, in which case there would be accusative alignment. This appears to have occurred in the Kartvelian language Mingrelian, where the ultimate starting point was ergative alignment (§.). In related Georgian there is semantic alignment in the aorist, but in Mingrelian the agentive case has been extended to all S arguments. In §. it will be argued that this is also what happened in most NENA dialects. ii. (Accusative > ) semantic > ergative through extension If the class of intransitive predicates taking SP encoding or behaviour grew at the expense of the class taking SAs, eventually all S arguments might align with P, in which case there would be ergative alignment. Such a development might well result in a marked absolutive case (Plank : ), something which is cross-linguistically unusual. On first sight, it appears that the Finnic languages are such a case, based on Itkonen (), which describes the development in Proto-Finnic of what he calls an ‘inverted ergative’ system of case marking (§..): that is, one where the absolutive is the marked case. It is clear from Itkonen () and Plank’s (: –) discussion, however, that the Finnic languages do not show strict ergative alignment, but in fact still have Split‑S alignment. No cases of an extended accusative developing into a strict ergative system are known to me.



Alignment

iii. Process of extension A question that arises out of the above scenarios is how this extension takes place in real time. Does the minor group expand gradually, verb by verb, until the last one shifts alignment and we again have syntactic alignment? Or does it reach a tipping point, when suddenly all the remaining verbs switch? We will examine this question for Eastern Aramaic in §.. .. Reconstructing alignment change on the basis of markedness Plank (: –) points out that we should not expect ergative and accusative systems to be homogenous phenomena, given the variety of mechanisms by which they come into being. By contrast, on the basis that active–inactive (Split-S) systems can only develop via intransitive‑centred developments (i.e. the adoption of A‑marking or P‑marking by some Ss), they ought to be less heterogeneous. It has long been recognized that (in bipartite systems), if only one argument is marked (or one is marked more than the other), it is generally the A argument in an ergative system and the P argument in an accusative system. As well as arising out of common pathways to these alignments, these are also more economical than the alternatives (in each case two out of the three roles, S, A, and P, are unmarked). There are, however, some exceptions to this: for instance, ‘marked-nominatives’. Plank (: ) lists the logically possible alignment and markedness combinations and discusses their attestation. As he remarks, ‘intransitive‑centred developments may easily wreak havoc on what appear to be optimal combinations of identificational patterns and markedness distributions from a paradigmatic-identificational perspective’. Thus, for instance, marked ergative morphology may be extended to some intransitives, resulting in Split‑S with marked SAs. If extended to all intransitives, it will result in an accusative system with a marked nominative. If marked accusative morphology is extended to some intransitives, it will result in Split‑S with marked SPs, as indeed we see, marginally, in Ancient Hebrew (§..). If this goes on to affect all intransitives, the result would be a marked absolutive system. This appears, however, not to be attested (§.. ii). Recognizing the impact of these diachronic developments can help in reconstructing the origins of certain alignment/markedness combinations. Thus, a Split‑S system might be expected to have originally been ergative, if the (more) marked argument is the agentive, and to have originally been accusative, if the (more) marked argument is the patientive. Furthermore, a marked nominative system might have been an ergative system in which ergative morphology was extended to Ss, creating first a Split‑S system, then, ultimately, an accusative one. In the case of a marked absolutive system, one could consider whether it originated in an accusative one, via the extension of accusative coding first to some and then to all intransitives.

Pathways of alignment change



.. Processes involved in alignment change The scenarios described above primarily involve two processes of alignment change. One is the introduction and spread of constructions which introduce new patterns of argument coding, often but not necessarily involving reanalysis. Examples include the use of antipassives in an otherwise ergative system, the introduction of transimpersonals, and the reanalysis of passive participles with oblique agents. Alignment may change more fundamentally in the language, if such constructions eventually replace ones with the old alignment. The other process is extension by analogy, where a coding pattern is extended from one construction or context to another. This is typically motivated by properties shared by the model and the copier. For instance, once a class of SA verbs exists which share particular semantics, it is easy for other verbs of similar semantics to adopt the same argument coding. It may also happen that the alignment in one or more tense–aspect–mood (TAM) constructions is adopted by the others, creating consistent alignment. See Harris and Campbell (: –) for more examples of extension. .. The role of language contact Language contact was mentioned in §§.. and .. as a factor in the development of semantic alignment. In fact, it seems to play a role more generally in alignment change, judging by the shared alignment systems found in some linguistic areas such as the Caucasus and Iran-India. Alignment patterns, like other grammatical patterns, may be affected by contact in various ways. Grammaticalization paths followed in the donor language might be replicated in the recipient language: for instance, a reanalysis of transimpersonals. Alternatively, a pattern might be replicated but via a different pathway: for instance, a distinct grammaticalization process. Not only new constructions but also extensions of patterns may be replicated. For instance, where one language has extended ergative marking to intransitive verbs, creating an SA class, this extension could be replicated, creating a similar class in the recipient language. See Heine and Kuteva () for more discussion of the various types of grammatical transfer. It is difficult to establish with certainty that cases of parallel alignment change which occurred along cross-linguistically common pathways resulted from language contact, as an internal motivation would also suffice. Nevertheless, where genetically diverse languages in contact have developed similar alignment patterns, and in particular where related languages in different areas have not developed these alignment patterns, there is strong evidence that contact influence is involved, no doubt alongside internal motivations. It will be argued in this work that the development of an ergative construction in Eastern Aramaic, as well as the development of semantic alignment, are in part motivated by contact with Iranian.



Alignment

. The development of tense-conditioned ergativity in Aramaic, Iranian, and Indic The most reliable evidence for alignment change comes from languages with a long and full written record. Hitherto Indo-Iranian (Iranian and Indic/Indo-Aryan) languages have figured prominently in discussions, particularly of tense-conditioned alignment (with ergativity in the past/perfective), as was briefly discussed in §.. i–iii. It has been claimed that the documentation of both the genesis and disappearance of ergativity is unique to these languages (e.g. Pirejko : ; Estival and Myhill : ). Aramaic, however, has a written tradition as least as long, stretching back nearly  years. Furthermore, several different historical stages are preserved, each one encompassing geographically diverse dialects, while the latest stage (Neo-Aramaic) has also been well documented, especially in recent decades. Within this richly documented history we can indeed find both the emergence of ergativity and its disappearance. In each of the Iranian, Indic, and Aramaic cases, evidence from early stages of the languages makes clear that the starting point was an accusative system, and that an ergative system developed for past tenses through the development of new constructions. The discussion in this book will therefore focus on how ergativity may develop in past/perfective tenses. This is a question which has attracted much attention and also controversy. Scholarly favour has switched from one theory to another and then back to the first. Much of the discussion has been specific to particular language families (e.g. Iranian). Nevertheless many of the arguments put forward could apply to the other cases. The first hypothesis put forward was the one deriving ergative constructions from passives with the agent expressed. This passive > ergative reanalysis scenario should not be conflated with the idea that ergative constructions are passives. Instead, according to this hypothesis, a passive construction with agent is reanalysed as active and thus ergative. This scenario has been supported, e.g., by Anderson (: –: ‘the primary attested mechanism by which a language can become ergative’— although he accepted the ‘possessive hypothesis’ for Iranian), Trask (—but not for Indo-Iranian), Estival and Myhill (, claiming all ergatives derive from passives), and Dixon (: , arguing that some, but not all, ergative constructions derive from passives). With regard to Iranian, Geiger () regarded the construction as (synchronically) passive—the concept ‘ergative’ had not yet been invented. Cardona () supported a passive origin (vs Benveniste /) and was followed in this by Payne () and Ciancaglini (). For Indic, this theory has been supported by Pray (), Anderson (), and Pirejko (), but opposed by Klaiman (), though she offers no alternative. Bynon initially (: –) supported this hypothesis for Iranian but later () proposed an

Ergativity in Aramaic, Iranian, and Indic



alternative for Indo-Iranian as a whole, involving a raised possessor reanalysed as agent (see §. for details). Outside these languages, a passive > ergative reanalysis was also proposed by Chung (, ) for Polynesian. In their overview of syntactic change, Harris and Campbell (: ) stated that ‘one of the best-understood pathways whereby languages can acquire ergative alignment is the development from passive to ergative’. Yet we will see that this pathway is in fact controversial and presents certain problems. The passive > ergative reanalysis theory works well up to a point: in the three language families mentioned above, the ergative construction is built on a former passive participle,16 so there is clearly a passive connection. Assuming there was additionally an intransitive construction, the scenario explains how P comes to have the same alignment as S: in a passive it is promoted to (nominative) subject: ()

a. By the owner (oblique) the house (nominative) has been built. b. The house (nominative) has fallen down.

At first glance, all that is needed for reanalysis is for the nominative (now encoding the S and the underlying P) to be termed absolutive and the oblique (expressing the underlying A) ergative: ()

a. By the owner (ergative) the house (absolutive) has been built. b. The house (absolutive) has fallen down.

Of course, it also requires the construction to be understood as active, that is, as basic and non-derived. Anderson () suggests that this can arise in a language where the passive+agent construction is not highly marked or rare, but rather very frequent, occurring under a wide variety of conditions. This wide distribution could further broaden until the construction, replacing the original active one, becomes obligatory and the basic, underived construction. In other words, once all clauses (in a particular tense) are expressed in the passive, the passive becomes the new active, bringing with it—for the reasons given above—ergative alignment. On the basis of Chung (, ), Anderson suggests this scenario fits the Polynesian family, where there are languages with a widely used passive and languages with ergativity (with the same morphology). Problems were identified with this scenario, however. Firstly, what could motivate the reanalysis of a passive with agent as active? English has a passive with agent construction (e.g. The house has been built by the owner) but this has not been reanalysed as ergative. There are important differences between a passive with agent and an ergative: in the passive, subject properties are typically assigned to the underlying P, while in the ergative usually at least some will be assigned to the A

16

Or at least a participle including a passive function.



Alignment

(Comrie : ). Typically, in a passive the topic will be the underlying P, while in an ergative, it will be the A (Bynon : ): this is clearly the case in the Iranian and Aramaic cases. In many languages, in fact, a passive does not even permit the expression of an agent—its function is to make it possible to omit the agent, rather than to demote it (Siewierska : ). Indeed, in Semitic languages, including Aramaic, agented passives are rare. The passive, furthermore, is typically a morphologically more complex form with an active counterpart (which is more frequent), whereas the ergative is typically morphologically simple and a basic form of the language, lacking an ‘active’ counterpart (Comrie : ).17 A further problem that arose with both Iranian and Aramaic is that the ergative marker is derived not from a former agent marker but from a dative (or merged dative-genitive, in the Iranian case), which otherwise had apparently no agentmarking function: ()

a. Old Persian ima taya manā kṛtam this which(n.) SG.GEN/DAT do.PTCP.N ‘This is what I have done.’ (Darius’ Inscription at Behistun, DB III –) b. Syriac Aramaic w-ʔaykannā da-šmiʕ-Ø l-an and-as REL-hear.PP-MS DAT-PL ‘And as we have heard’ (Book of the Laws of Countries, ed. Drijvers : –)

In response to these problems, another scenario was proposed, by Benveniste (/) and Anderson () for Iranian and Kutscher () for Aramaic. This was that the ergative construction resulted from the reanalysis of a possessive construction, on the basis that (i) in these languages, possession was predicated by means of a dative(-genitive) marker (To me is a book=I have a book), and (ii) the ergative construction expressed perfect aspect. These facts led these scholars to draw a parallel with the HAVE‑perfects in Romance, Germanic, and elsewhere. This model had the advantage that it explained the origin of the ergative in a dative(-genitive), and also explained how it could mark a topic (a possessor is typically high on the animacy scale and thus topic-worthy, unlike the demoted agent of a passive construction). The Possessive Theory was challenged for Iranian by Cardona () and Ciancaglini (), but supported by Noda (, ) and (in modified form) by Haig (). There remain certain problems, at least in the Aramaic case, with both theories. This book will put forward a theory for the Aramaic development which

17

See also Haig (: –) on distinguishing between passive and ergative constructions.

A full cycle of alignment change



overlaps in certain respects with both theories, but differs in that it suggests that the construction which became the ergative construction first developed among verbs taking a dative experiencer argument. This theory has sometimes been conflated with the Possessive Theory. It will, however, be shown that the two constructions, though formally similar, are distinct, and that this difference is reflected in a different lexical distribution of the construction at its earliest stage, namely a high frequency with verbs of perception and cognition. The Aramaic case—the question of how Aramaic acquired tense-conditioned ergativity—is intimately bound up with the emergence and development of a verbal construction involving a passive participle and dative prepositional phrase. This is known by Aramaicists as Qṭil li, based on its form with the paradigmatic Aramaic (and shared Semitic) verb qṭl ‘to kill’: ()

qṭil-Ø l-i kill.PP-MS DAT-SG ‘I have killed (him)’

The development of Qṭil li and its reflex in modern Eastern Aramaic, Qṭəlli (or PAST-L), has already been treated by several specialists in (Neo-)Aramaic, notably Kutscher (), Cohen (), Pennacchietti (), Hopkins (), Hoberman (: –), Goldenberg (), Polotsky (), Kapeliuk (), Coghill (), Coghill and Deutscher (), Hemmauer and Waltisberg (), Bar-Asher (Siegal) (, , ),18 Doron and Khan (, ), Kogan and Loesov (), Loesov (), and Kirtchuk-Halevi (forthcoming ). The ideas in these contributions will be discussed as relevant, but the current book aims at a broader scope, in terms of drawing upon as much relevant dialectal data as feasible, both historic and contemporary. It will further relate the facts to cross-linguistic tendencies, in order to offer new insights into the changes that took place in Aramaic, as well as to contribute to general theory in the field of alignment change.

. A full cycle of alignment change There has been pessimism that a language could be found where a full cycle of alignment change (e.g. accusative > ergative > accusative) is documented. According to Pustet (: ), ‘chances are that the time spans required by the completion of a full cycle of this sort are considerable’. They are indeed considerable; nevertheless Aramaic can be numbered among the few languages where this full cycle of

18

Bar-Asher Siegal (), a development of Bar-Asher (), was brought to my attention too close to the final submission to incorporate a discussion of its conclusions, some of which, however, concur with mine.



Alignment

alignment change can be traced, with documentation available from each of the major stages of the cycle. Other cases are Iranian and possibly Indic.19 It is hoped that the Aramaic case, well documented as it is, can provide a model which may be found to fit other less well-documented cases of alignment change in the world’s languages. The next chapter will introduce the Aramaic language, its history and structure, in preparation for examining its alignment systems in detail.

19 That is, unless we take the ancestor of the ergative construction already to be ergative in Sanskrit, as suggested by Klaiman (: ) and Bynon (). Bynon (: –) argues, however, for a preergative construction in Vedic. The same issue arises for Iranian: Haig (: ) views the Manā Kṛ tam construction in Old Persian as not syntactically different from the Middle-Iranian ‘ergative construction’. We could, however, look to Avestan for a pre-ergative stage. The Manā Kṛ tam construction is, at most, marginal in Old Avestan: there are examples of the passive participle with the instrumental of agent, though not in main clauses, and one unambiguous example with a dative pronoun: aēm mōi idā vistō ‘this man here I have found’ (West : – §, , §, and p.c.; Jügel ). It is indisputable, however, that there are early (and later) Aramaic dialects documented where the (proto-)ergative construction had not appeared. These dialects therefore were fully accusative and represent the earlier pre-ergative stage. It could also be argued that the early proto-ergative constructions in all three language families were so marginal as to be better considered an idiom rather than a part of the verbal system.

3 Aramaic . Historical stages of Aramaic Aramaic is the name given not only to an ancient language but also to the diverse dialects and languages it developed into over three thousand years (rather as if the term Latin covered the Romance languages as well as the ancient language). The Aramaic language family is part of the larger Semitic language family (along with Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian, Amharic, etc.) and in turn part of Afroasiatic (along with Ancient Egyptian, Berber, and others). First used by the ancient Aramaeans, the language came to be used by many different religious and ethnic groups, and splintered into different varieties, for some of which distinct writing traditions were developed. The following (based on Fitzmyer ; and Kaufman ) shows the commonly accepted chronological phases of attested Aramaic: i. ii. iii. iv. v.

Ancient (Old) Aramaic, c. – BC Imperial (Official) Aramaic (Reichsaramäisch), c. – BC Middle Aramaic, c.  BC–AD  Late (Classical) Aramaic, c. AD –, and still used today in writing Modern (Neo-)Aramaic, earliest texts: sixteenth century

These are, of course, to some extent arbitrary divisions: there are rarely sudden, dramatic changes in a language’s development (although the written record may sometimes give this impression). Note too that these phases cover only the attested (written) varieties of Aramaic. Extant texts cannot tell us the full extent of dialectal diversity, which may have been considerable. Many dialects were never written down, while others were written on perishable materials that have not survived. Furthermore, written varieties are not always a faithful reflection of a contemporary spoken dialect: they often constitute a compromise between various spoken dialects and are frequently archaicizing. Nevertheless, until a time machine is invented, these written varieties are all we have at our disposal in tracing changes in the Aramaic language, and some sort of chronological division is a practical necessity. The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic. First edition. Eleanor Coghill. © Eleanor Coghill . First Published  by Oxford University Press



Aramaic

The earliest period of Aramaic, Ancient Aramaic, is known through inscriptions from around  BC onwards, a time when the Aramaean kingdoms were being established in what is now Syria, southern Turkey, and Iraq. The ensuing phase of Imperial Aramaic is a period where a relatively standardized language was used across and beyond the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Biblical Aramaic (as found in the biblical books of Ezra and Daniel) is a version of Imperial Aramaic.1 Middle Aramaic dates to the Hellenistic and Roman periods and is attested in inscriptions from Palmyra, Petra, Hatra, and other sites, as well as in Jewish texts (some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and early targums). Some dialectal differences are apparent in Middle Aramaic, but by the period of Late Aramaic, clear East–West dialectal divisions had developed. Under Late Western Aramaic we place the dialects found in Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian texts originating in Palestine (targums, the Jerusalem Talmud, some Christian Bible translations, etc.). Under Late Eastern Aramaic, which will feature prominently in this book, we find the following varieties: i. Syriac (originating in Edessa, modern-day Şanlıurfa in southern Turkey, but used over a much wider area, a liturgical language of eastern Christianity and the best documented Aramaic variety) ii. Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (or JBA, the language of the Babylonian Talmud and subsequent Ge’onic literature of the Talmudic academies in Babylonia, modern-day southern Iraq) iii. Classical Mandaic (the ancient language of the Mandaeans in Babylonia, as documented in their religious texts) Under the label of Late Eastern Aramaic we also find the Aramaic of the Babylonian magic bowl texts. These bowls, originating in southern Mesopotamia, were written in the Jewish Square Script, the Mandaic script, and the Syriac script, presumably in most cases according to the religious affiliation of the scribe. Their importance for the history of Aramaic lies in the fact that very few Late Aramaic manuscripts actually date to the period in which their texts were composed: copying mistakes and hypercorrections may have corrupted the texts that have come down to us. On the other hand, the magic bowl texts may to some extent have been written in archaicizing language (as Juusola : – suggests with regard to the Jewish magic bowls). It has been argued that Syriac not only geographically but also linguistically takes an intermediate position between Western (Palestinian) and Eastern (southern Mesopotamian) Aramaic (Kim : ), sharing isoglosses with both. This may well be the case and merits further research, but in terms of the presence of the Qṭil li

1 So Fitzmyer (: ), although Kaufman (: ) attributes the language of Daniel to Middle Aramaic.

Historical stages of Aramaic



construction Syriac stands with Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Classical Mandaic, and ‘Late Eastern Aramaic’ is a useful cover term for our purposes. Neo-Aramaic is a scholarly cover term for the modern descendants of Aramaic. The Neo-Aramaic dialects are extremely varied, encompassing, in linguistic terms, several different languages. The Western branch is today only represented by three closely related dialects spoken in villages near Damascus (most notably Maaloula /Maʕlūla/). The Eastern dialects are far more widespread and varied and can be divided into three genetically distinct groups: i. North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (or NENA), spoken by Christian and Jewish communities, is the largest and most varied group, including well over a hundred dialects, and native to an area spread across northern Iraq, south-eastern Turkey, north-western Iran, and north-eastern Syria2 (references too many to list: an overview aimed at Semitists is given by Khan ). The endonym for its Christian speakers is Suraθ/Surit (or a variant thereof ), literally ‘Syriac’, but translated usually as ‘Assyrian’ or ‘Chaldean’. Jewish speakers may simply call their varieties ‘our language’ (Lišāna Deni or the respective dialectal variants). ii. Ṭ uroyo Group Neo-Aramaic (Ṭ uroyo, Jastrow /, and Mlaḥ so, Jastrow ) is spoken by Christians originating in south-eastern Turkey. Mlaḥ so, indigenous to the villages of Mlaḥ sô (modern-day Yünlüce) and ʿAnša in Diyarbakır province, is now extinct, but was documented just before its extinction on the basis of the last remaining speakers. Ṭ uroyo (endonym Surayt)3 is native to the Ṭ ur ʿAbdin4 region and surrounds. Within Ṭ uroyo relatively little variation has been documented, but some significant differences exist between the dialects of the town Midyat (Məḏyaḏ) and the village Midin (Midən). iii. Neo-Mandaic (Häberl ) is no longer the native language of the majority of Mandaeans, but nevertheless is still spoken by a small number in Khuzistan in Iran. Within the Mandaean community of southern Iraq it has died out completely. See Map  for the geographical distribution of the different branches of Neo-Aramaic. It should be noted that these dialects do not, geographically or 2 In fact many dialects are now only spoken outside the original homeland, due to expulsions and emigrations from the nineteenth century onwards, in particular the genocide and expulsions of Christian communities in Turkey during the First World War, and the persecution and ethnic cleansing affecting communities in Syria and Iraq exactly a hundred years later. Jewish speakers almost all left their homeland in the s and most remaining speakers are now to be found in Israel. Because of these events, most dialects are highly endangered. 3 Cognate with NENA Suraθ. The term Ṭ uroyo (an adjective derived from ṭur ‘mountain’) is mostly restricted to academic circles. It has the advantage for our purposes of specifying the geographical location of the language, but is dispreferred by some native speakers. 4 Syriac for ‘Mountain of Servants’.



Aramaic

linguistically, precisely represent the successors of the attested Late Aramaic dialects. Aramaic is no longer spoken in Edessa (modern-day Şanlıurfa) and the nearest Aramaic dialect (Ṭ uroyo) is spoken over  km to the east. We have little evidence of the Late Aramaic dialects spoken in northern Mesopotamia, where NENA is now spoken. Of the southern Mesopotamian dialects of Late Aramaic, only Mandaic has survived to the modern day, and only the dialects of Iran: sadly the dialects spoken in Iraq died out before being documented. It is in the Eastern branch of Aramaic that the ergative construction (Qṭil li) emerged (Kutscher ), and, among the surviving varieties, it took firm hold only in the NENA dialects and the Ṭ uroyo Group, which share similar, innovative verbal systems. Although Classical Mandaic had Qṭil li, no reflex of the construction exists in the Neo-Mandaic dialects that have survived. The process of classifying the hugely diverse NENA dialects is still in the early stages. It may never be possible to group the Christian dialects into discrete subfamilies, as to some extent they form a dialect continuum. Suffice to say that, like the Jewish dialects, they show considerable variation across the region. The Jewish dialects have proved easier to classify, although with more data on the lesser known varieties or on extinct dialects, the picture might be different. Mutzafi (b) distinguishes three groups. The first, Lishana Deni (lit. ‘Our language’), comprises closely related dialects spoken mainly in north-western Iraq, between the Tigris and the Great Zab river—for instance, the Jewish dialects of Zakho, Amadiya, and Nerwa. Linguistically, these are very similar to and mutually comprehensible with some Christian dialects of Iraqi Kurdistan. The Central Zab group includes the Barzani dialect cluster, now virtually extinct. The Trans‑Zab group is very diverse, with three identifiable branches: the Azerbaijani dialects (including Jewish Urmi), the Western Trans‑Zab dialects, including the Jewish dialects of Arbel, Koy Sanjaq, and Rustaqa, and the South‑East (SE) Trans‑Zab dialects, including the Jewish dialects of Sulemaniyya(-Ḥ alabja), Sanandaj, and Kerend. This last group is of particular importance in tracing alignment change in Eastern Neo‑Aramaic, being conservative in this respect. Aramaic presents a rare opportunity to trace long-term syntactic changes. The first Aramaic texts date to around  BC, and there are diverse descendants surviving today. Many different dialects have also been attested in the intervening periods, offering a wealth of resources for historical linguistics. Recent shorter-term changes can also be traced, thanks to the preservation of Christian and Jewish manuscripts written in Neo-Aramaic dialects of northern Iraq, dating as far back as the late sixteenth century (published, e.g., in Sabar , ; Mengozzi a, b). Although the language of these manuscripts is recognizably Neo-Aramaic rather than Late Aramaic, it preserves archaic features and lacks constructions that are well-established in the modern dialects of the same places. The difference between sixteenth-century and twentieth-/twenty-first-century

Morphosyntactic typology of Aramaic



Black Sea

TURKEY Caspian Sea

MLAH.SO Diyarbakir

T.UROYO NORTH-EASTERN NEO-ARAMAIC

SYRIA IRAN WESTERN NEO-ARAMAIC Damascus

IRAQ

NEO-MANDAIC

Persian Gulf

MAP  Neo-Aramaic dialects (all branches)

Neo-Aramaic is in fact roughly comparable to the differences between the English of these two periods.5

. Morphosyntactic typology of Aramaic In order to put into context the developments in alignment and to aid understanding of the examples and their glosses, a short outline will be given here of the morphosyntactic typology of Aramaic. In many respects, this has remained remarkably stable over the 5 Just as English during this period has gained a number of analytical TAM constructions, such as the present continuous (‘I am eating’) and the prospective going to-constuction, which exist alongside older constructions (the present simple and the will-future), so too have NENA dialects gained similar analytical constructions alongside older forms. See Coghill (a) and Mengozzi ().



Aramaic

language’s three-thousand-year recorded history, but the focus here will be on Late Eastern Aramaic and its successor, Neo-Aramaic, as these are the main periods in which the ergative construction Qṭil li developed. .. Root-and-pattern system The verbal (and to a lesser extent nominal) morphology of Aramaic, like that of other Semitic languages, has a non-concatenative root-and-pattern system, complemented by affixes. Most verb lexemes have a root, consisting prototypically of three consonants (‘weak roots’ have at least one semi-vowel, e.g. /y/, /w/, as a radical). These three consonants are slotted into a vocalic template, which varies according to derivation and TAM form. This will be illustrated below with examples from North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA), specifically from the Christian dialect of Alqosh (Coghill ). In NENA, the main tenses are formed from the Present Base and the Past Base. These have the following templates in verbs of Derivation I: ⃞a ⃞ ⃞ ⃞ ⃞ə ⃞ -

Present Base stem Past Base stem

The template may alternatively be represented with ‘C’ representing a root consonant: Present Base stem Past Base stem

CaCCCCəC-

The consonants normally occur in the same order. In some Semitic verbal forms, one consonant may be doubled (‘geminated’): this has been almost completely lost in the NENA verbal system. To avoid any ambiguity the root consonants may be numbered: Present Base stem Past Base stem

CaCCCCəC-

Other templates commonly found in NENA verbal systems are the resultative participle, active participle, imperative, and infinitive (a verbal noun): Resultative Participle Active Participle Imperative Infinitive

CCiC-a CaCāC-a CCoC CCāC-a

With actual verb lexemes, such as šql I ‘to take’ and pθx I ‘to open’, these are formed as follows: Present Base stem Past Base stem

šaqlšqəl-

paθxpθəx-

Morphosyntactic typology of Aramaic Resultative Participle Active Participle Imperative Infinitive

šqil-a šaqāla šqol šqāl-a



pθix-a paθāx-a pθox pθāx-a

The templatic stems take affixes, clitics, or auxiliary verbs marking person, tense, etc. Some of these are illustrated in the following examples: ()

a. šqəl-la take.PAST-L.FS ‘she took’

b. b-šaql-a FUT-take.PRES-S.FS ‘she will take’

c. wot

bə-šqāla DEIC.COP.SG in-take.INF ‘you are taking’

Each verb lexeme not only possesses a triradical root, but also belongs to a derivational class (also known as a ‘stem’ or binyan). These derivations are loosely associated with transitivity and valency alternations. The number of derivations varies from dialect to dialect. In Late Aramaic dialects such as Syriac, there were six common derivations, known by their (hypothetical) forms with the paradigmatic root pʕl (Peʿal ‘to labour’): Peʿal, Paʿʿel, Aphʿel, and their mediopassive voice6 counterparts Ethpeʿel, Ethpaʿʿal, Ettaphʿal.7 In most North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, as well as Ṭ uroyo,8 there are three reflexes of Peʿal, Paʿʿel, and Aphʿel, named I (or Neo-Peʿal), II (Neo-Paʿʿel), and III (Neo-Aphʿel). Peʿal and its reflex, Derivation I, are the most basic, formally and semantically. Derivations Paʿʿel and Aphʿel and their respective modern reflexes, II and III, known sometimes as the ‘derived stems’, frequently express the transitive or causative equivalent of Peʿal/I. These derivations are not fully productive, however, and for a given root often only one or two derivations exist (and not necessarily I). The semantic relationship between derivations of the same root is also not fully predictable. In addition to triradical roots there are also also quadriradicals, which have another template, though with a similar vocalic pattern to Paʿʿel/Derivation II. Verb lexemes are identified by root (e.g. šql) and derivation (I, II, III or, rather redundantly, Q), e.g. šql I ‘to take’, šxlp Q ‘to change’ (Alqosh dialect). In this work Peʿal/Derivation I templatic forms will be used to represent the different verbal constructions of Aramaic. Some examples from texts may however be from other derivations, so the reader should not be surprised to encounter different forms.

6

Farina () examines the functions of these derivations in depth. These are the usual spellings, but note that ph represents the fricative allophone of /p/, transcribed elsewhere as p̄, and th the fricative allophone of /t/, elsewhere t. 8 Ṭ uroyo has in fact preserved the Et‑ derivations but they have lost their independence and been absorbed into the inflection of Derivations I, II, and III (Coghill : –). 7



Aramaic

.. Argument marking Aramaic lost the original Semitic case suffixes very early on.9 One can, however, find in some varieties argument markers that are attached to a noun phrase, in the form of prepositional clitics. In a broad sense, these clitics could be considered a kind of case marking (Dryer ). Many varieties, both ancient and modern, display differential object marking, whereby definite, topical, or more animate direct objects are flagged by a preposition. In most cases this preposition also has a dative function: ()

a. Syriac Aramaic šḇ aq-ton l-ḇ āroyā abandon.PST_PFV-NOM.MPL DAT/DOM-Creator ‘You have abandoned the Creator.’ (Acta sanctorum martyrum orientalium et occidentalium I, ed. Assemanus a: ; Nöldeke : /§) b. NENA dialect of Telkepe bd-āxəl-Ø-wā-lə FUT-eat.PRES-S(NOM).MS-ANT-L(ACC).MS ‘It would eat the crop.’ (Coghill : )

ta DAT/DOM

zarɒ crop(m.)

As will be shown later (§.), a dative prepositional clitic l- was used to mark the ergative in Late Aramaic, and still survives today in this function in a dialect of Ṭ uroyo (§..). Typically arguments are indexed on the verb in Aramaic varieties, both old and new. Subjects are normally obligatorily indexed on the verb, whether or not there is additionally an NP subject: in Haspelmath’s terminology (§..), they are ‘crossindexes’. Direct and indirect objects also frequently trigger indexing on the verb. When there is an independent NP object, then a coreferential index only occurs under certain conditions, which vary from dialect to dialect but which involve definiteness, topicality, and animacy. This is also a kind of differential object marking:10

9 Proto-Semitic is reconstructed as having three cases: nominative, accusative, and genitive, with only a two-way nominative-oblique distinction in the plural (Hasselbach : –). Case was lost in Aramaic via the erosion of final short vowels (Hasselbach : ). The Ancient Aramaic dialect of Samʾal still retained a distinction between nominative and oblique cases in plural nouns (which were encoded by long vowels), but in later dialects even this is lost. The accusative case survived in its adverbial function into the first millennium BC; in all other contexts productive case disappeared (Kaufman : ). 10 See Rubin (: –) for an overview of differential object marking in pre-modern Aramaic, and Khan () for details of the syntax of object marking in Aramaic and other Semitic languages. For an analysis of DOM in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic, with a focus on the Christian Telkepe dialect, see Coghill (). Objects in ditransitive constructions are discussed in Coghill (b).

Morphosyntactic typology of Aramaic ()



a. Syriac Aramaic qṭal-t-āh kill.PST_PFV-NOM.SG-ACC.FS ‘I killed her.’ b. NENA dialect of Alqosh qṭil-ā-li kill.PST_PFV-S(ACC).FS-L(NOM).SG ‘I killed her.’ (Coghill : )

.. Word order Word order is flexible in many Aramaic dialects, both ancient and modern. In NorthEastern Neo-Aramaic, and no doubt in other varieties, word order is primarily used to express information structure, with the topic typically appearing sentence-initially. In many NENA dialects, such as Telkepe, the verb tends to come between the arguments (i.e. SVO and OVS are common). In other dialects, such as the Jewish South-Eastern Trans-Zab dialects, the verb tends to come at the end (probably as a result of Iranian influence; Khan b). .. Nominal morphology Nouns have two genders, masculine and feminine, and inflect for plural by means of suffixes. Adjectives inflect for gender and number to agree with the noun. In NENA and the Ṭ uroyo Group, the gender distinction is neutralized in the plural of adjectives. Nominals, comprising nouns and adjectives, occur in three states for most periods of Aramaic: Absolute State (the bare noun), Emphatic State (with suffix ‑ā in the singular), and Construct State. In earlier Aramaic dialects, such as Biblical Aramaic, the Absolute State was broadly indefinite and the Emphatic State definite, e.g. mleḵ ‘a king’, malk‑ā ‘the king’. In predications the Absolute State was typically used, also with participles, e.g. šappīr ‘(he) is beautiful’. The Construct State was a form used for the head noun of a tightly bound genitive construction. In Late Aramaic dialects such as Syriac, the Emphatic State had lost its definite value and become the unmarked form, neutral as to definiteness, e.g. malkā ‘king, a king, the king’. The Absolute State accordingly became very restricted with nouns, while remaining in use with adjectives as a predicative form.11 Predicated participles remained in the Absolute State and these became increasingly important in the verbal system (see §.). Meanwhile the Construct State continued to be used for genitive 11 The Absolute State was still common with nouns in certain circumstances, for instance after kol ‘every, all’, with numerals, and in negative expressions (Nöldeke : –/§§–).



Aramaic

constructions, but in competition with constructions using the genitive/subordinating particle d‑: ()

Syriac a. with first noun in Construct State mleḵ bāḇ el king.of Babylon b. with d‑ malkā d-ḇ āḇ el king of-Babylon ‘king of Babylon’ (Nöldeke : /§)

In North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, the reflex of the Emphatic State (‑a) remains the unmarked form of the noun, neutral as to referentiality: ‘malka king (generic), a king, the king’. The Absolute State, apart from some fossilized forms, only survives in the reflexes of earlier participles in the verbal system. Otherwise, predication is usually achieved by means of special copulas. In most dialects the original Construct State is not productive, surviving only with a select group of nouns. A newer construct state has been formed by the cliticizing of the particle d‑ to the stem of the first noun of the genitive construction, as ‑əd, e.g. bɛθ‑əd malka [house-of king] ‘the king’s house’ (Alqosh dialect). The older construction continues in some dialects, used when the construction is broken by a pause or intervening material: bɛθa . . . d‑malka [house . . . of‑king] ‘house . . . of the king’ (Alqosh dialect). Some Jewish dialects have introduced new genitive constructions on the model of Iranian Ezafe. See Gutman () for a study of NENA genitive constructions. In Ṭ uroyo, again the reflex of the Emphatic State, here ‑o, is the unmarked form of the noun, e.g. malko ‘king’. A definite article has developed from demonstratives: u=malko ‘the king’. In both NENA and Ṭ uroyo, as in Syriac, the numeral ‘one’ may be used for introducing indefinite nouns that are specific and which go on to be prominent in the discourse, e.g. xa=gora [one.M=man] ‘a certain man’ (Alqosh NENA). The purpose of the present chapter was to provide an overview of the various historical stages of Aramaic, its dialectal variation, and the linguistic structures that the reader can expect to encounter in subsequent chapters of this book. The next two chapters will focus on alignment patterns, firstly in the modern Eastern Aramaic dialects, then in the earlier Eastern Aramaic dialects, thus preparing the ground for the subsequent historical sections of the book.

4 Alignment in Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects . Overview In modern Aramaic dialects, argument alignment is manifested mainly in the selection of cross-indexes on the verb (encoding person, gender, and number). Argument marking on NPs is far less widespread.1 All dialects show accusative alignment in the non‑past tenses, but in some dialects the indexing aligns ergatively in past perfective tenses. It must be stressed, however, that ergative alignment is restricted by additional conditions. One is the characteristics of the P argument: certain types of Ps show distinct behaviour and thus do not align with intransitive subjects. There is also a degree of semantic alignment, both Split- and Fluid-S. These conditions will be discussed in detail later (§§.., .., .., and .). We are speaking, therefore, of an alignment in the past perfective somewhere on a continuum, but towards the ergative end. The modern dialects which have this (restricted) ergative indexing are Ṭ uroyo and a group of Jewish NENA dialects. Such ergative alignment as they have is mainly restricted to the past perfective and has come about through the development of the fairly marginal Late Aramaic perfect Qṭil li into a general past perfective (Qṭəlli or PAST-L), as will be outlined in Chapter . In some dialects, non-accusative alignment has also developed in the perfect—an analytical verb form based on a resultative participle plus copula (§.). Ergativity is not found in present or future tenses. Thus, these Neo-Aramaic dialects display a cross-linguistically typical tense-conditioned split in alignment (§..).

1 Dative NPs are marked with a preposition and in some NENA dialects a (synchronically or diachronically) dative preposition marks certain types of objects (see Coghill ). In one Ṭ uroyo dialect a dative preposition is used to mark ergative NPs (see §..). Other than in such cases, arguments NPs are not flagged.

The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic. First edition. Eleanor Coghill. © Eleanor Coghill . First Published  by Oxford University Press



Alignment in Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects

The following Ṭ uroyo examples show the kind of tense-conditioned split found in Neo-Aramaic varieties. The argument-encoding indexes are glossed with their formal labels (S- and L-suffixes), while their functions (which vary depending on the stem they are attached to) are given in brackets.2 () Present a. nəšq-o-le nəšq -o kiss.PRES -S(NOM).FS ‘She kisses him.’

-le -L(ACC).MS

b. dəmx-o dəmx -o sleep.PRES -S(NOM).FS ‘She sleeps.’

Past perfective c. nšiq-o-le d. damix-o nšiq -o -le damix kiss.PAST -S(ABS).FS -L(ERG).MS sleep.PASTINTR ‘He kissed her.’ ‘She slept.’ (adapted from Jastrow /: , , )

-o -S(ABS).FS

From these examples it is clear that one and the same index encodes both A and S (i.e. the nominative subject) in the present tense, while this same index encodes P and S (i.e. the absolutive) in the past perfective. Within NENA, the dialects which have some degree of ergative alignment in the past perfective are a subgroup of the Jewish Trans-Zab dialects. The Jewish TransZab dialects are those spoken by Jews in the towns and villages east and south-east of the Great Zab river (see Map ), in Northern Iraq and North-Western Iran (see Mutzafi b for a discussion of distinguishing features, mainly phonological and morphological). The verbal system of the South-East Trans-Zab dialects, with its transitive–intransitive split, was first discussed in Hopkins (). The majority of NENA dialects have accusative alignment throughout; yet they preserve a morphological quirk that can be explained by reference to an earlier tenseconditioned ergative stage. This is an inversion of the functions of the indexes on the verb, such that one set marks subject in present/future/imperfective verb forms but object in past perfective forms, while the other marks object in the present/future/ imperfective and subject in the past perfective. In NENA dialects, an A or S is normally obligatorily indexed on the verb,3 while P is only indexed under certain conditions (normally involving definiteness, 2 Nominative (NOM) and accusative (ACC) are not usually used as glosses for argument indexes on verbs, yet ergative (ERG) and absolutive (ABS) are regularly used for both cases and arguments markers on the verb. To be consistent, I will use nominative and accusative rather than subject (SUBJ) and object (OBJ), although I accept this is to some extent arbitrary. See Haspelmath () for a discussion of the pros and cons of the two strategies. 3 With some exceptions: existential constructions do not index a subject (the presentee argument is hardly a canonical subject in any case). Some NENA dialects also possess constructions with a fixed,

Overview



MLAH.SO

TURKEY

SYRIA

Gaznax

URMI Billin Bne-Lagippa Umra Ashitha Umra d-ShishBarwar Betanure Nerwa Tin Peshabur Zakho Amadiya Aradhin Hamziye Alqosh Shosh-u-Sharmin Rustaqa Telkepe Karimlesh Ankawa Mosul Qaraqosh Erbil/Arbel

Bohtan

T.UROYO

Hertevin

Bēs.pәn

IRAN Sainqala Bokan Tikab Saqqiz Bana

Koy Sanjaq Sulemaniyya

Bijar Pirtaj

Panjwin

H . alabja

IRAQ

Sanandaj

Kamyaran Khanaqin

Qasr-e-Shirin Kerend

MAP  Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects with non-accusative alignment in past perfective or perfect

topicality, or animacy; see Coghill ). The alignment of P, therefore, depends on these conditions. In what follows, I shall first discuss the NENA dialects with only accusative alignment in their argument indexes, covering details of the argument encoding which will be relevant later to the historical discussion. I shall then discuss those NENA dialects which have some degree of ergative alignment in the past perfective, namely the SE Trans‑Zab dialects. In the historical section (Chapter ) it will be shown that in certain respects these preserve an earlier stage of the language. In §. I will present the dialects that have some degree of ergative alignment in an analytical perfect construction, which is a relatively late development in NENA. I will then present the situation in Ṭ uroyo, which also has some degree of ergative alignment in the past perfective. The Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects with non-accusative alignment (whether in the past perfective or in the perfect) are shown in their geographical locations on Map .

uninflected, subject suffix. Such constructions will be addressed in a paper on grammatical relations in Telkepe Neo-Aramaic (Coghill forthcoming).



Alignment in Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects

. Dialects with only accusative alignment .. Definition The situation in the vast majority of NENA dialects (including all attested Christian dialects) is one of accusative alignment throughout the indexing of arguments on verbs. As we will see, however, there are features in the morphology of these dialects that are relics of an earlier stage of tense‑conditioned ergativity. The verbal systems of all known NENA dialects are based primarily (leaving aside analytical verb forms) on two stems, known as the Past and Present Bases. The Present Base (PRES) takes the form CaCC- in Derivation I verbs (see §..). Forms built from this base express irrealis modality, present tense, future tense, and past imperfective, depending on the affixes attached to it. With one particular prefix it functions as an allomorph of a Past Base construction. The Past Base (PAST) takes the form CCəC- or, before a vowel, CCiC- in Derivation I verbs. Forms built on this base usually express the past perfective (often known as the Preterite). There are two pronominal suffixes which index arguments on the verb: these are known as S-suffixes and L-suffixes.4 Each can be found on both bases. Subject indexing is normally obligatory: this is marked by S-suffixes on the Present Base and L-suffixes on the Past Base. The paradigms in Table . are from Jewish Amadiya5 (based on Hoberman : –), but are similar to the paradigms of other NENA dialects:6 TABLE . Subject inflection of bases PRES-S   

ms. fs. pl. ms. fs. pl. ms. fs. pl.

šāqəl-Ø šaql-a šaql-i šaql-ət šaql-at šaql-etun šaql-ən šaql-an šaql-ax

PAST-L he may take she may take they may take you (ms.) may take you (fs.) may take you (pl.) may take I (m.) may take I (f.) may take we may take

šqəl-le šqəl-la šqəl-lu šqəl-lux šqəl-lax šqə´l-loxun

he took she took they took you (ms.) took you (fs.) took you (pl.) took

šqəl-li

I took

šqəl-lan

we took

4 Confusingly there are almost as many names for these index sets as there are Neo-Aramaicists. Here the terminology will be according to the usage in Geoffrey Khan’s grammars, namely S-suffixes and L-suffixes. 5 Also known as Amedya. 6 The transcription has been adapted to my own system. Note that Hoberman’s ‘A-suffixes’ are here called ‘S-suffixes’.

Dialects with only accusative alignment



J. Amadiya is typical in allowing a variety of tense–aspect–mood (TAM) forms to be built on the inflected bases through affixes (Hoberman : ). Without a prefix, the inflected Present Base expresses the subjunctive. A k- prefix on the Present Base marks the indicative, a b- prefix a future tense.7 A suffix -wa expresses anteriority on both bases (anterior to the corresponding form without it; Hoberman : ). Thus, k-PRES‑S-wa expresses past imperfective; PAST‑wā‑L a pluperfect or remote past perfective. An equivalent to PAST-L in TAM values can be formed from the Present Base with the prefix qam-. This form can only occur in conjunction with object suffixes (Hoberman : ). The various Present and Past Base forms are exemplified below with the verb šql I ‘to take’: ()

Verbs formed on the Present Base (J. Amadiya): a. šaql-a take.PRES-S(NOM).FS ‘let her take’ b. k-šaql-a IND-take.PRES-S(NOM).FS ‘she takes’ c. b-šaql-a FUT-take.PRES-S(NOM).FS ‘she will take’ d. qam-šaql-ā-le TR.PST_PFV-take.PRES-S(NOM).FS-L(ACC).MS ‘she took him’ e. k-šaql-ā-wa IND-take.PRES-S(NOM).FS-ANT ‘she used to take’

()

Verbs formed on the Past Base (J. Amadiya): a. šqəl-la take.PAST-L(NOM).FS ‘she took’ b. šqəl-wā-la take.PAST-ANT-L(NOM).FS ‘she had taken’

7 Across NENA these prefixes commonly undergo partial assimilation, especially voicing assimilation, to the following consonant, so that an allomorph of k‑ is g‑ and an allomorph of b‑ is p‑.



Alignment in Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects

When both personal suffixes (S- and L-) occur on the verb, the order is: Base-S-L. Table . shows the forms as found in the same dialect (Hoberman : , ): TABLE . Order of suffixes on Past and Present Bases L-SUFFIXES1

S-SUFFIXES

PRES PAST

+

ms. fs. pl. ms. fs. pl. ms. fs. pl.

-Ø -a -i -ət -at -etun -ən -an -ax

+

ms. fs. pl. ms. fs. pl. sg.

-le -la -lu -lux -lax -loxun -li

pl.

-lan

1

Note: The /l/ of the L‑suffixes assimilates to certain preceding consonants, according to morphophonological rules, e.g. šqil‑ət‑te