This article discusses two case studies of diachronic “voice flipping” in which the syntax of a participle appears
to change from active or “subject-oriented” to passive (Ancient Greek ‑menos to Modern Greek
‑menos) and from resultative/stative to active (Proto-Indo-European *-nt-; Hittite ‑ant‑ vs.
Ancient Greek ‑nt‑). While the first type of change is the result of a diachronic reanalysis by which a
functional projection (VoiceP) is lost, the second type in fact adds an active Voice head. Both changes are the result of the
simultaneous availability of a stative and an eventive reading in deverbal adjectival forms and could belong to a larger
“participle cycle”. However, unlike in other changes usually discussed under the label “cycle”, unidirectional economy principles
do not apply in these cases. Rather, these cases provide evidence that some types of morphosyntactic change, especially those
related to event and argument structure, are driven by reanalysis of the feature content of functional heads under local
structural ambiguity.
1954Altindische Grammatik, vol. II,21: Die Nominalsuffixe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Alexiadou, Artemis
2013Where is non-active morphology? In Stefan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 244–262. CSLI publications.
Alexiadou, Artemis
2018‑able adjectives and the syntax of psych verbs. Glossa 3(1): 74, 1–27.
Alexiadou, Artemis & Elena Anagnostopoulou
2008Structuring participles. In Charles B. Chang & Hannah J. Haynie (eds.), Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 33–41. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.
Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou & Florian Schäfer
2015External arguments in transitivity alternations: A layering approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alexiadou, Artemis & Edit Doron
2012The syntactic construction of two non-active voices: Passive and middle. Journal of Linguistics 481: 1–34.
2012Perfect periphrases in Post-Classical and Early Byzantine Greek: An ecological-evolutionary account. Journal of Greek Linguistics 121: 205–275.
Bjorkman, Bronwyn
2011BE-ing default: The morphosyntax of auxiliaries. Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation.
Bobaljik, Jonathan D.
2017Distributed morphology. Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics.
Bruening, Benjamin
2013By-phrases in passives and nominals. Syntax 16(1): 1–41.
Chantraine, Pierre
1926Histoire du parfait grec. Paris: Champion.
CHD = Güterbock, Hans G. and Harry A. Hoffner
1989The Hittite dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, vol. L-N. Chicago.
Clark, Robin & Ian Roberts
1993A computational model of language learnability and language change. Linguistic Inquiry 24(2): 299–345.
Cotticelli-Kurras, Paola & Velizar Sadovski
(eds.)2017“In participle we predicate”: Con-tributions of the comparative and historical linguistics to grammar and semantics of participle. Wien: Holzhausen.
Cournane, Ailís
2017In defense of the child innovator. In Eric Mathieu & Robert Truswell (eds.), Micro-change and macro-change in diachronic syntax, 10–24. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press.
Embick, David
1997aVoice and the interfaces of syntax. University of Pennsylvania dis-sertation.
Embick, David
1997bVoice systems and the syntax/morphology interface. In Heidi Harley (ed.), Papers from the UPenn/MIT roundtable on argument structure and aspect, 41–72. MITWPL 32.
Embick, David
2000Features, syntax, and categories in the Latin perfect. Linguistic Inquiry 31(2): 185–230.
Embick, David
2004aUnaccusative syntax and verbal alternations. In Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou & Martin Everaert (eds.), The unaccusativity puzzle, 137–158. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Embick, David
2004bOn the structure of resultative participles in English. Linguistic Inquiry 35(3): 355–392.
Embick, David
2015The morpheme. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Embick, David & Rolf Noyer
2007Distributed morphology and the syntax/morphology interface. In Gillian Ramchand & Charles Reiss (eds.), Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces, 289–324. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fellner, Hannes A.
2014Tocharian special agents: The nt-participle. Tocharian and Indo-European Studies 151: 53–67.
Fellner, Hannes A. & Laura Grestenberger
2018Die Reflexe der *-nt‑ und *-mh1no‑Partizipien im Hethitischen und Tocharischen. In Elisabeth Rieken (ed.), 100 Jahre Entzifferung des Hethitischen: Morphosyntaktische Kategorien in Sprachgeschichte und Forschung. Akten der Arbeitstagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft vom 21. bis 23. September 2015 in Marburg, 63–82. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Francez, Itamar & Andrew Koontz-Garboden
2015Semantic variation and the grammar of property concepts. Language 91(3): 533–563.
Frotscher, Michael
2013Das hethitische ‑ant-Partizip und seine indogermanischen Grundlagen: Semantik, Morphologie, Syntax. Università degli Studi di Verona dissertation.
Garcia Ramón, José Luis
2017Heterogenous correspondences and reconstruction: The ‘gerundive’ in ‑mi-na in Hieroglyphic Luvian. In Claire Le Feuvre, Daniel Petit & Georges-Jean Pinault (eds.), Verbal adjectives and participles in Indo-European languages. Proceedings of the conference of the Society for Indo-European Studies, Paris, 24th to 26th September 2014, 85–103. Bremen: Hempen.
Garrett, Andrew
1996Wackernagel’s Law and unaccusativity in Hittite. In Aaron L. Halpern & Arnold M. Zwicky (eds.), Approaching second: Second position clitics and related phenomena, 85–134. Stanford: CSLI publications.
van Gelderen, Elly
2008Negative cycles. Linguistic Typology 121: 195–243.
2018The diachrony of verb meaning: Aspect and argument structure. New York: Routledge.
George, Coulter H.
2005Expressions of agency in Ancient Greek. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press.
Grestenberger, Laura
2014Feature mismatch: Deponency in Indo-European languages. Harvard University dissertation.
Grestenberger, Laura
2016More span-conditioned allomorphy: Voice morphology in Classical Greek. In Christopher Hammerly & Brandon Prickett (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 46, vol. 21, 1–10. Amherst: GLSA.
Grestenberger, Laura
2017On the syntax of the participles of Indo-European deponent verbs. In Claire Le Feuvre, Daniel Petit & Georges-Jean Pinault (eds.), Verbal adjectives and participles in Indo-European languages. Proceedings of the conference of the Society for Indo-European Studies, Paris, 24th to 26th September 2014, 105–117. Bremen: Hempen.
Grestenberger, Laura
2018Deponency in finite and nonfinite contexts. Language 94(3): 487–526.
Grestenberger, Laura
2019Deponency in morphology. Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics.
Grestenberger, Laura
Forthcoming a. The ín-group: Indo-Iranian in-stems and their Indo-European relatives. In a forthcoming Festschrift, Ann Arbor: Beech Stave.
Grestenberger, Laura
Forthcoming b. Two types of passive? Voice morphology and “low passives” in Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek. In Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Akemi Matsuya & Eva-Maria Remberger eds. Passives cross-linguistically: Theoretical and experimental approaches Leiden Brill
Hajnal, Ivo
1994Die lykischen a-stämme. Zum Werdegang einer Nominalklasse. In Jens Elmegård Rasmussen & Benedikte Nielsen (eds.), In honorem Holger Pedersen. Kol-loquium der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Kopenhagen 1993, 307–330. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Hale, Mark
2007Historical linguistics: Theory and method. Malden: Blackwell.
Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz
1993Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Kenneth L. Hale & Samuel J. Keyser (eds.), The view from building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 111–176. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Harley, Heidi
2009The morphology of nominalizations and the syntax of vP. In Monika Rathert & Anastasia Giannadikou (eds.), Quantification, definiteness and nominalization, 320–342. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harley, Heidi & Rolf Noyer
1999State-of-the-article: Distributed Morphology. GLOT International 41: 3–9.
Harris, Alice C. & Lyle Campbell
1995Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. Forthcoming. Disharmonic headedness in Homeric Greek and Tocharian and implications for Proto-Indo-European reconstruction. Proceedings of DiGS 20, University of York, June18–212018.
Hoffner, Harry A. Jr. & H. Craig Melchert
2008A grammar of the Hittite language. Part I: Reference grammar. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.
Holton, David, Peter Mackridge & Irene Philippaki-Warburton
1997Greek: A comprehensive grammar of the modern language. London: Routledge.
Holton, David & Io Manolessou
2010Medieval and Early Modern Greek. In Egbert J. Bakker (ed.), A companion to the Ancient Greek language, 539–563. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Inglese, Guglielmo
2018The Hittite middle voice. University of Bergamo dissertation.
Israel, Michael, Christopher Johnson & Patricia J. Brooks
2000From states to events: The acquisition of English passive participles. Cognitive Linguistics 11(1–2): 1003–1029.
Jamison, Stephanie W. & Joel P. Brereton
2014The Rigveda: The earliest religious poetry of India, vol. I-III. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jankuhn, Harald
1969Die passive Bedeutung medialer Formen untersucht an der Sprache Homers. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Jasanoff, Jay H.
2003Hittite and the Indo-European verb. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jasanoff, Jay H.
2017The impact of Hittite and Tocharian: Rethinking Indo-European in the 20th Century and beyond. In Jared Klein, Brian Joseph & Matthias Fritz (eds.), Hand‑ book of comparative and historical Indo-European linguistics (Handbucher zur Sprach‑ und Kommunikationswissenschaft 41(1)), 220–238. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
2014The Rich Agreement Hypothesis rehabilitated. Linguistic Inquiry 45(4): 571–615.
Kratzer, Angelika
2001Building statives. In Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General session and parasession on aspect (2000), 385–399. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Lavidas, Nikolaos
2012Passive in the history of Greek: Evidence for the role of the passive suffix. Folia Linguistica Historica 331: 87–121.
Le Feuvre, Claire, Daniel Petit & Georges-Jean Pinault
(eds.)2017Verbal adjectives and participles in Indo-European languages. Proceedings of the conference of the Society for Indo-European Studies, Paris, 24th to 26th September 2014. Bremen: Hempen.
Leumann, Manu
1977Lateinische Laut‑ und Formenlehre. Lateinische Grammatik, vol. I1. München: Beck.
Levin, Beth & Malka Rappaport Hovav
1995Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lightfoot, David
2006How new languages emerge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lowe, John J.
2014Indo-European Caland adjectives in *-nt‑ and participles in Sanskrit. Historische Sprachforschung 1271: 166–195.
Lowe, John J.
2015Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit: The syntax and semantics of adjectival verb forms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lowe, John J.
2017Transitive nouns and adjectives: Evidence from early Indo-Aryan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2005From participles to gerunds. In Melitta Stavrou & Arhonto Terzi (eds.), Advances in Greek generative syntax: In honor of Dimitra Theophanopoulou-Kontou, 241–283. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Marantz, Alec
1997No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. In Alexis Dimitriadis, Laura Siegel, Clarissa Surek-Clark & Alexander Williams (eds.), Proceedings of the 21st annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 4(2), 201–225.
Melchert, H. Craig
1998The dialectal position of Anatolian within Indo-European. In Benjamin K. Bergen, Madelaine C. Plauché & Ashlee C. Bailey (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, special session on Indo-European subgrouping and internal relations, 24–31. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Melchert, H. Craig
2014Anatolian nominal stems in *-(C)o-. In Norbert Oettinger & Thomas Steer (eds.), Das Nomen im Indogermanischen. Morphologie, Substantiv versus Adjektiv, Kollektivum. Akten der Arbeitstagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft vom 14. bis 16. September 2011 in Erlangen, 205–214. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Melchert, H. Craig
2017aThe source(s) of Indo-European participles in *-e/ont. In Claire Le Feuvre, Daniel Petit & Georges-Jean Pinault (eds.), Verbal adjectives and participles in Indo-European languages. Proceedings of the conference of the Society for Indo-European Studies, Paris, 24th to 26th September 2014, 217–220.
Melchert, H. Craig
2017b “Western affinities” of Anatolian. In Bjarne Simmelkjaer Sandgaard Hansen, Benedicte Nielsen Whitehead, Thomas Olander & Birgit Annette Olsen (eds.), Etymology and the European lexikon. Akten der 14. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Kopenhagen, 17.-22. Sept., 2012, 297–305.
Melchert, H. Craig
2018Hittite and Indo-European: Revolution and counter-revolution. In Elisabeth Rieken (ed.), 100 Jahre Entzifferung des Hethitischen: Morphosyntaktische Kategorien in Sprachgeschichte und Forschung. Arbeitstagung der lndogermanischen Gesellschaft, Philipps-Universität Marburg, 21. bis 23. September 2015, 289–294. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Melchert, H. Craig
To appear. The position of Anatolian. In Andrew Garrett & Michael Weiss eds. Handbook of Indo-European studies Oxford Oxford University Press
Müller, Gereon
2013Approaches to deponency. Language and Linguistics Compass 7(6): 351–369.
Napoli, Maria
2017To what extent does the Greek participle participate in the passive voice system? In Paola Cotticelli-Kurras & Velizar Sadovski (eds.), “In participle we predicate”: Contributions of the comparative and historical linguistics to grammar and semantics of participle, 109–127. Wien: Holzhausen.
Nussbaum, Alan J.
1976Caland’s “Law” and the Caland-System. Harvard University dissertation.
Nussbaum, Alan J.
2017Agentive and other derivatives of ‘τóμος-type’ nouns. In Claire Le Feuvre, Daniel Petit & Georges-Jean Pinault (eds.), Verbal adjectives and participles in Indo-European languages. Proceedings of the conference of the Society for Indo-European Studies, Paris, 24th to 26th September 2014, 233–266. Bremen: Hempen.
Oettinger, Norbert
1986“Indo-Hittite”-Hypothese und Wortbildung. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck.
Oettinger, Norbert
2001Neue Gedanken über das ‑nt-Suffix. In Onofrio Carruba & Wolfgang Meid (eds.), Anatolisch und Indogermanisch/Anatolico e Indoeuropeo. Akten des Kolloquiums der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Pavia, 22.-25. September 1998, 301–315. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck.
Oettinger, Norbert
2017Der Ursprung des indogermanischen Caland-Systems und die nt‑Stämme. In Claire Le Feuvre, Daniel Petit & Georges-Jean Pinault (eds.), Verbal adjectives and participles in Indo-European languages. Proceedings of the conference of the Society for Indo-European Studies, Paris, 24th to 26th September 2014, 267–275. Bremen: Hempen.
Oltra-Massuet, Isabel
1999On the notion of theme vowel: A new approach to Catalan verbal morphology. Massachusetts Institute of Technology MA thesis.
Oltra-Massuet, Isabel & Karlos Arregi
2005Stress-by-structure in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry 16(1): 43–84.
2017Little v as a categorizing verbal head: Evidence from Greek. In Roberta D’Alessandro, Irene Franco & Ángel J. Gallego (eds.), The verbal domain, 29–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Papangeli, Dimitra & Nikolaos Lavidas
2009Deponents and non-finite constructions in Greek. In Claire Halpert, Jeremy Hartman & David Hill (eds.), Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop in Greek syntax and semantics at MIT. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 571, 197–211.
Rau, Jeremy
2009Indo-European nominal morphology: The decads and the Caland system Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck.
Rieken, Elisabeth
2009Der Archaismus des Hethitischen – eine Bestandsaufnahme. Incontri Linguistici 321: 37–52.
Ringe, Don
1988–1990[1991]Evidence for the position of Tocharian in the Indo-European family?Die Sprache 341: 59–123.
Ringe, Don & Joseph F. Eska
2013Historical linguistics: Toward a twenty-first century reintegration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ringe, Don, Tandy Warnow & Ann Taylor
2002Indo-European and computational cladis-tics. Transactions of the Philological Society 100(1): 59–129.
Roberts, Ian
2007Diachronic syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, Ian & Anna Roussou
2003Syntactic change: A minimalist approach to grammat-icalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2017Romance and Greek medio-passives and the typology of Voice. In Roberta D’Alessandro, Irene Franco & Ángel J. Gallego (eds.), The verbal domain, 129–152. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schmidt, Klaus T.
1992Archaismen des Tocharischen und ihre Bedeutung für Fragen der Rekonstruktion und der Ausgliederung. In Robert Beekes, Alexander Lubotsky & Jos Weitenberg (eds.), Rekonstruktion und relative Chronologie. Akten der VIII. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Leiden, 31. Aug.-4. Sept. 1987, 101–112. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck.
2016How are words related? In Daniel Siddiqi & Heidi Harley (eds.), Morphological metatheory, 1–26. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Taylor, Ann
1994The change from SOV to SVO in Ancient Greek. Language Variation and Change 61: 1–37.
Walkden, George
2014Syntactic reconstruction and Proto-Germanic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willis, David
2011Reconstructing last week’s weather: Syntactic reconstruction and Brythonic free relatives. Journal of Linguistics 471: 407–466.
Winter, Werner
1998Lexical archaisms in the Tocharian languages. In Victor H. Mair (ed.), The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age peoples of Western Central Asia. Vol. I, Archeology, migration and nomadism, linguistics, 347–357. Washington: Institute for the Study of Man.
(eds.)2008Nomina im Indoger-manischen Lexikon. Heidelberg: Winter.
Zombolou, Katerina
2004Verbal alternations in Greek: A semantic analysis. University of Reading dissertation.
Zombolou, Katerina & Artemis Alexiadou
2014The canonical function of the deponent verbs in Modern Greek. In Franz Rainer, Francesco Gardani, Hans Christian Luschützky & Wolfgang U. Dressler (eds.), Morphology and meaning: Selected papers from the 15th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 2012, 331–344. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Cited by (6)
Cited by 6 other publications
Calabrese, Andrea & Roberto Petrosino
2023. Root-adjacent exponence in the Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin verbal systems. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8:1
Giannaris, Thanasis
2023. The Development of the Copular Participial Periphrases in Ancient Greek: Evidence for Syntactic Change and Reconstruction. In Internal and External Causes of Language Change, ► pp. 119 ff.
Spyropoulos, Vassilios
2023. The Development of Absolute Participial Constructions in Greek. In Internal and External Causes of Language Change, ► pp. 49 ff.
Grestenberger, Laura
2022. To <em>v</em> or not to <em>v</em> ? Theme vowels, verbalizers, and the structure of the Ancient Greek verb. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 47:1
Grestenberger, Laura
2023. Deponency. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology, ► pp. 1 ff.
Grestenberger, Laura & Itamar Kastner
2022. Directionality in cross-categorial derivations. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.