As the historical linguistic community is well aware, reconstructing semantics is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Such reconstruction has so far mostly been carried out on lexical items, like words and morphemes, and has not been conducted for larger and more complex linguistic units, which intuitively seems to be a more intricate task, especially given the lack of methodological criteria and guidelines within the field. This follows directly from the fact that most current theoretical frameworks are not construction-based, that is, they do not assume that constructions are form-meaning correspondences. In order to meet this challenge, we present an attempt at reconstructing constructional semantics, and more precisely the semantics of the Dative Subject Construction for an earlier stage of Indo-European. For this purpose we employ lexical semantic verb classes in combination with the semantic map model (Barðdal 2007, Barðdal, Kristoffersen & Sveen 2011), showing how incredibly stable semantic fields may remain across long time spans, and how reconstructing such semantic fields may be accomplished.
2020. Indo-European Inroads into the Syntactic-Etymological Interface: A Reconstruction of the PIE verbal root *menkʷ- ‘to be short; to lack’ and its Argument Structure. Historical Linguistics 133:1 ► pp. 62 ff.
2022. What makes the dative-experiencer construction in Modern Hebrew different from its counterparts in European languages?. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 75:3 ► pp. 379 ff.
Hartmann, Stefan & Michael Pleyer
2021. Constructing a protolanguage: reconstructing prehistoric languages in a usage-based construction grammar framework. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376:1824
Haug, Dag Trygve Truslew, Marius Jøhndal & Per Erik Solberg
2019. An Unexpected Root Clause. Linguistic Inquiry 50:3 ► pp. 649 ff.
Johnson, Cynthia A., Peter Alexander Kerkhof, Leonid Kulikov, Esther Le Mair & Jóhanna Barðdal
2013. Jacob Wackernagel. Lectures on Syntax. With Special Reference to Greek, Latin, and Germanic. Edited by DAVID LANGSLOW.. Kratylos 58:1 ► pp. 101 ff.
Pacchiarotti, Sara & Leonid Kulikov
2022. Bribri media tantum verbs and the rise of labile syntax. Linguistics 60:2 ► pp. 617 ff.
2019. Reconstructing the ditransitive construction for Proto-Germanic: Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic. Folia Linguistica 53:s40-s2 ► pp. 555 ff.
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