Corpus linguistics and diachronic syntax: Subject case, finiteness and agreement in Slavonic languages

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Ernst Hansack; Professor Dr. Björn Hansen; Professor Dr. Roland Meyer
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2007 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 52445734

The occurrence of nominative case on the subject and the agreement with a finite verb are so closely connected in many languages that their correlation has often been hard-wired into syntactic analyses. No only in Slavonic languages, however, are there phenomena which deviate from this standard pattern and, therefore, are particularly telling for accounts of subject properties and the theory of case licensing. The present grant proposal aims at elucidating the rise and development of such non-canonical ("peripheral") instances of subject case in the history of Slavonic languages. To this end, recent corpus-linguistic methods shall be applied and advanced. The proposal ties in with the first funding period of the project, which primarily treated the overt vs. null realization of subjects, and, secondarily, also so-called dative subjects. Departing from the latter, the complex area of subject case and finiteness shall now be fully examined. Consequently, coverage of the grammaticalization of all important superficial properties of subjects in Slavonic languages would be achieved. Relevant phenomena, first of all, concern nominative arguments with deficient or missing finiteness marking on the verb: nominatives with the infinitive in Czech, as well as historically and dialectally in (North) Russian; nominative arguments with passive participles (resultatives), partly or fully neutralized for agreement in Old and Middle Russian, and the respective developments in Polish and Ukrainian. Secondly, the project shall address non-nominative (quirky case) subjects in Russian and Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian (BCS). Since quirky subjects also regularly occur in constructions of the former kind, both groups must be analyzed jointly. Common earlier analyses which assigned object status to the nominative argument shall be scrutinized on theoretical and emipirical grounds. The linguistic base of comparison shall be expanded to include Ukrainian and BCS, which display phenomena highly relevant to the project topic, in their resultative and modal constructions, respectively. The necessary diachronic corpora with relevant annotations can be supplied due to already existing ressources and the expertise gained in the first funding period. The proposal promises contributions to Slavonic and general linguistic research on subject properties, finiteness and agreement, modality and passive, primarily in the diachronic realm. By realizing digitised annotated sources (corpora) with public online access and by consequently applying quantitative techniques, the project furthermore strives for methodological headway in diachronic linguistics in the Slavonic languages and beyond.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants