Reconstructing constructional semantics: The dative subject construction in Old Norse-Icelandic, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Russian and Old Lithuanian

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 int...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Studies in language 2012-01, Vol.36 (3), p.511-547
Main Authors: Barðdal, Jóhanna, Smitherman, Thomas, Bjarnadóttir, Valgerður, Danesi, Serena, Jenset, Gard B., McGillivray, Barbara
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ancient Greek
Grammatical case
Greek language
Icelandic language
Indo-European languages
Language reconstruction
Latin language
Lexical semantics
Lexicon
Linguistic units
Lithuanian language
Morphemes
Old Norse
Russian language
Semantic fields
Semantics
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0378-4177
1569-9978
1569-9978
DOI:10.1075/sl.36.3.03bar