Philologists aiming to reconstruct the grammar of ancient languages face the problem that the available data always underdetermine grammar, and in the case of gaps, possible mistakes, and idiosyncracies there are no native speakers to consult. The authors of this volume overcome this difficulty by adopting the methodology that a child uses in the course of language acquisition: they interpret the data they have access to in terms of Universal Grammar (more precisely, in terms of a hypothetical model of UG). Their studies, discussing syntactic and morphosyntactic questions of Older Egyptian, Coptic, Sumerian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Classical Greek, Latin, and Classical Sanskrit, demonstrate that descriptive problems which have proved unsolvable for the traditional, inductive approach can be reduced to the interaction of regular operations and constraints of UG. The proposed analyses also bear on linguistic theory. They provide crucial new data and new generalizations concerning such basic questions of generative syntax as discourse-motivated movement operations, the correlation of movement and agreement, a shift from lexical case marking to structural case marking, the licensing of structural case in infinitival constructions, the structure of coordinate phrases, possessive constructions with an external possessor, and the role of event structure in syntax. In addition to confirming or refuting certain specific hypotheses, they also provide empirical evidence of the perhaps most basic tenet of generative theory, according to which UG is part of the genetic endowment of the human species - i.e., human languages do not "develop" parallel with the development of human civilization. Some of the languages examined in this volume were spoken as much as 5000 years old, still their grammars do not differ in any relevant respect from the grammars of languages spoken today.

Grammatical description and instruction have left their enduring imprint on European scholarship and culture. For more than twenty centuries, grammar has been the cornerstone of humanist education, and has been transmitted continuously, albeit in changing - chronologically, geographically, politically, and institutionally - contexts. The papers in this volume document the transmission, adaptation and re-elaboration of grammar, since Antiquity, by focusing on its foundational concepts and techniques. The vectors of these processes of transmission and adaptation are texts, and behind these texts, we can reconstruct networks of interaction: between teachers and students, between scholars and models of description, and - as the overarching dynamics - the dialogue between the members of the "virtual community" interested in the study of language. The seventeen papers of this volume have been arranged into six sections: "Grammar: The Fate of a Cultural Discipline"; "The Origins of Linguistic Reflection in Ancient Greece"; "Ancient Greek grammar: Theorization and Practice"; "Latin Grammar in Antiquity and the Low Middle Ages: Heritage and Innovation"; "Renaissance Grammar and Rhetoric: The Encounter between Classical Languages and the Vernaculars"; "Philological Deposits of Ancient Latin Grammars"). The volume is rounded off with detailed indices (Index of names; Index of Greek, Latin, and Latinized technical terms; Index of concepts).

This book is the result of 15 years of research on the ancient Hebrew relative clause as well as the effective application of modern linguistic approaches to an ancient language corpus. Though the ostensible topic is the relative clause, including a full discussion of the various relative words used to introduce Hebrew relative clauses and a detailed presentation of the relevant comparative Semitic data, this work also carefully navigates the challenges of analyzing a “dead” language and offers a methodological road map for the analysis of any feature of Biblical Hebrew grammar. With the appendixes of relative clause data, including the author’s English translations, the work aims at comprehensiveness, exhaustiveness, and full transparency in data, method, and theory.

Pulling together the threads of forty years of research on oblique subjects in the Germanic languages, this book introduces a novel approach to grammatical relations, based on a definition of subject as the first argument of the argument structure. New data are presented from Gothic, Old Saxon, Old Norse-Icelandic, Old Swedish and Old Danish, as well as from Icelandic, Faroese and German. This includes alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat predicates, where either argument, the dative or the nominative, takes on subject behavior. The subject concept is modeled with the formalism of Construction Grammar, both synchronically and for the purpose of reconstructing grammatical relations for Proto-Germanic.

This volume collects ten studies that propose modern methodologies of analyzing and explaining language change in the case of various morpho-phonological and morpho-syntactic characteristics. The studies were first presented in the fourth, fifth and sixth workshops at the “Language Variation and Change in Ancient and Medieval Europe” summer schools, organized on the island of Naxos, Cyclades, Greece and online between 2019 and 2021. The book is divided into two parts that both focus on modern tools and methodologies of analyzing and accounting for language change. The first part focuses on common directions of change in Indo-European languages and beyond, and the second part emphasizes explanations that reveal the role of language contact. The volume promotes a dialogue between approaches to language change having their starting point in structural and typological aspects of the history of languages on the one hand, and approaches concentrating on external factors on the other. Through this dialogue, the volume enriches knowledge on the contrast or complementarity of internally- and externally-motivated causes of language change.

The present volume deals with hitherto unexplored issues on the interaction of morphology and syntax. These selected and invited papers mainly concern Cushitic and Chadic languages, the least-described members of the Afroasiatic family. Three papers in the volume explore one or more typological characteristics across an entire language family or branch, while others focus on one or two languages within a family and the implications of their structures for the family, the phylum, or linguistic typology as a whole. The diversity of topics addressed within the present volume reflects the great diversity of language structures and functions within the Afroasiatic phylum.

Coping with Obscurity publishes the papers discussed at the Brown University Workshop on Earlier Egyptian grammar in March, 2013. The workshop united ten scholars of differing viewpoints dealing with the central question of how to judge and interpret the grammatical value of the written evidence preserved in texts of the Old and Middle Kingdoms (ca. 2350-1650 BC). The nine papers in the volume present orthographic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic approaches to the data and represent a significant step toward a new, pluralistic understanding of Earlier Egyptian grammar.