The Diachrony of Case in Indo-European Absolute Constructions

Abstract

This paper explores changes in the syntax of Absolute Constructions (AC) over time in several older Indo-European languages. Taking early AC structure to have involved inherent case assignment from a phonologically-null P head to its nominalised small clause complement, we identify two novel diachronic trajectories along which ACs were reanalysed due to the instability of this initial structure. The first, exhibited in Greek and Latin, involved the syntactic reduction and integration of the AC through loss of the (covert) PP layer, which gave rise to structural case-marking and new syntactic distributions. In the second, several Germanic languages retained the original AC structure but relexicalised the inherent case-assigning P head into an overt preposition.  Drawing on a range of diagnostics to track changes in AC clause size across languages and time, we present an analysis of the shift from inherent to structural case on the basis of configurational approaches to case assignment.