Armenian Morphosyntactic Alignment in Diachrony

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Version: Author's accepted manuscript
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Serval ID
serval:BIB_FD4DFE5CCBAA
Type
A part of a book
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Armenian Morphosyntactic Alignment in Diachrony
Title of the book
Alignment and Alignment Change in the Indo-European family
Author(s)
Meyer Robin
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Publication state
Published
Issued date
23/08/2022
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Editor
Dahl Eystein
Volume
50
Series
Oxford studies in diachronic and historical linguistics
Language
english
Abstract
This chapter outlines the development of morphosyntactic alignment in Armenian from its pre-attested stage to modern forms of the language. For the most part, Armenian follows a nominative–accusative alignment pattern; the only exception occurs in the periphrastic perfect in Classical Armenian. This tense shows tripartite alignment: subjects are marked as nominative, agents as genitive, and objects as accusative. This alignment split prevails until the end of the Classical Armenian period. The origin of this alignment pattern lies in the contact with the West Middle Iranian language Parthian from which Armenian has borrowed heavily in several linguistic domains. The Armenian perfect and its alignment are the grammaticalised result of pattern replication, by which the Parthian ergative–absolutive past tense is borrowed into Armenian and there realised by means of the participle. The change from ergative–absolutive to tripartite alignment is based on morphosyntactic reanalysis of the object case.
Keywords
Morphosyntactic Alignment, Language contact, Pattern Replication, Parthian, Armenian, Historical syntax
Create date
03/12/2020 1:25
Last modification date
21/11/2022 9:15
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