The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic: Cycles of Alignment Change

This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eastern Aramaic dialects first developed tense-conditioned ergative aligment in the perfect, which later developed into a past perfective. However, while some modern dialects preserve a degree of ergative aligment, it has been eroded by movement towards semantic/Split-S alignment and by the use of separate marking for the patient, and some dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. These dialects therefore show an entire cycle of alignment change, something which had previously been considered unlikely.

Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic texts, recent dialectal documentation, and cross-linguistic parallels to provide an account of the pathways through which this alignment change took place. She argues that what became the ergative construction was originally limited mostly to verbs with an experiencer role, such as 'see' and 'hear', which could encode the experiencer with a dative. While this dative-experiencer scenario shows some formal similarities with other proposed explanations for alignment change, the data analysed in this book show that it is clearly distinct. The book draws important theoretical conclusions on the development of tense-conditioned alignment cross-linguistically, and provides a valuable basis for further research.

Eleanor Coghill studied Assyriology, Arabic, and Hebrew at the University of Cambridge, before specializing in the study of the endangered dialects of Neo-Aramaic, spoken in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Following a PhD and Junior Research Fellowship also at Cambridge, she worked on the Cambridge North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Project, documenting some of the huge dialectal diversity of the language. She has also investigated aspects of change in Aramaic, both short and long term. Between 2010 and 2015 she was at the Zukunftskolleg and Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, leading a project funded by the German Research Council on how the grammar of Neo-Aramaic dialects has been affected by contact with neighbouring languages. She currently works as a researcher on the Language and Space project at the University of Zurich.