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Non-Canonically Case-Marked Subjects: The Reykjavík-Eyjafjallajökull papers
Edited by Jóhanna Barðdal, Na'ama Pat-El and Stephen Mark Carey
[Studies in Language Companion Series 200] 2018
► pp. 213–238

Chapter 9
Accusative sickness?

A brief epidemic in the history of German

| University of Nottingham
| University of Minnesota, Morris

Germanic languages that retain case marking and oblique subjects may undergo a change in argument structure over time. Nominative Sickness in Germanic has been demonstrated by Eythórsson (2002) and Barðdal (2009, 2011) for verbal arguments in which obliques are replaced with the nominative. Additionally, formerly accusative subjects become dative, a process widely referred to as Dative Sickness or Dative Substitution in the international literature. Dative Sickness is found across the development of several Germanic Languages (Barðdal 2011; Dunn et al. 2017). However, a change in case marking from a dative subject to an accusative subject is not well attested. The following examination explores instances in which Dative Subject Constructions in Old High German experience Accusative Sickness in Middle High German. That is, they start occurring with an accusative argument instead of the earlier, historically correct, dative.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Oblique subjects in German: A brief overview
  • 3.The semantic distribution of the Oblique Subject Construction
    • 3.1Accusative subjects in Old and Middle High German
  • 4.Variation in Old and Middle High German: Six case studies
    • 4.1Old High German thunken ‘think/seem’
    • 4.2Old High German girinnen ‘lack/run out of sth’
    • 4.3Old High German (un)uuillon ‘feel nausea’
    • 4.4Old High German angusten ‘fear’
    • 4.5Old High German wola sîn ‘be well’
    • 4.6Old High German gelimphen ‘be obliged’
    • 4.7Old High German wê sin ‘have woe’
  • 5.Formalization
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.200.09dew
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