Barðdal, Jóhanna
Kulikov, Leonid
[UCL]
THIS chapter focuses on the main aspects of the reduction/loss of case and the decay of case marking systems. The general mechanisms which lead to the merger of case and case syncretism and, eventually, to the loss of (some) cases include: (i) phonetic processes whiсh result in the loss of the difference between two or more case forms, i.e. erosion of case inflection, and, thus, in case syncretism; (ii) overlapping of syntactic and semantic functions and/or uses of individual cases, i.e. syntactic and semantic affinity of some cases; (iii) semantic or functional overlapping of whole argument structures; and (iv) a variety of analogical developments and paradigmatic levelling (cf. Kulikov 2006). Often these mechanisms work together so that several factors create favourable (albeit not always sufficient) conditions for the case mergers. The phenomenon of case syncretism can be best illustrated with examples from the history of the Indo-European languages which attest nearly all possible types of case mergers within the original eight-case Proto-Indo-European case system: genitive-ablative (Slavic, Greek), nominative-accusative (Balkan: Romanian, Albanian), dative-locative (Greek), ablative-instrumental-locative (Latin), dative-ablative-instrumental-locative (Celtic, Germanic), etc. (cf. Luraghi 1987 and Chapter 14). The ultimate case syncretism is typically preceded by a period of variation and alternation between case forms or argument structures, with the source forms being interchangeably employed in some usages with only some minor functional distinctions (see Kulikov 2013). The interplay between phonetic erosion and the semantic/functional overlap of case forms and argument structure constructions can be demonstrated with examples from several Indo-European language groups, as these provide rich evidence for various scenarios of the decay and collapse of case systems.
Bibliographic reference |
Barðdal, Jóhanna ; Kulikov, Leonid. Case in Decline. In: Jae Jung Song (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Case, Oxford University Press : Oxford 2009, p. 470-478 |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/267318 |