This paper reassesses the rise of ergative alignment in Anatolian and Indo-Aryan, two branches of the Indo-European linguistic family. Both of these branches acquire split-ergative morphosyntax in the course of their history but via different grammaticalization paths and with different results.… read more
This paper examines the development of the aspect systems in the Indo-European languages Vedic and Latin. Even though aspectual distinctions are central in the verbal systems of both of these languages at the beginning of their attested traditions, they undergo quite different developments in the… read more
This paper outlines the origin and development of the synthetic Perfect from Indo-Iranian, the reconstructed common ancestral stage of the Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages, to Vedic, the oldest attested stage of Old Indo-Aryan. Comparative evidence from Old Iranian, Homeric Greek and a number of… read more
This paper pursues the development of the predicated -tá construction through the different stages of Vedic. In the earliest stage of the language, this construction represents a predicated, p-oriented verbal adjective, which subsequently develops into a passive, that in turn evolves into an… read more
This chapter gives an overview of the current state of the art of research on ergativity in Indo-Aryan. First, it discusses a number of theoretical and terminological issues concerning synchronic and diachronic dimensions of ergative alignment and outlines a typology for exploring the relationship… read more
This paper examines the encoding of Experiencer arguments in Early Vedic, the earliest attested stage of Indo-Aryan. Although Experiential predicates show a broad variety of case-marking patterns in this language, the Experiencer is primarily expressed by the nominative, the accusative or the… read more
The Vedic aorist indicative presents a classic case of the development from aspect to tense. In Early Vedic, the aorist indicative has properties typical of perfective past categories cross-linguistically, whereas in later stages of Vedic it is primarily, if not exclusively used to express that a… read more
In Early Vedic, the earliest attested stage of Indo-Aryan, many two-place verbs allow their object argument to be alternately expressed by two or more case categories, i.e., they show object alternation. In this paper I examine three different object alternation patterns and show that they have… read more