@article{jbp:/content/journals/10.1075/jhl.3.1.04hoc, author = "Hock, Hans Henrich", title = "Proto-Indo-European verb-finality: Reconstruction, typology, validation", journal= "Journal of Historical Linguistics", year = "2013", volume = "3", number = "1", pages = "49-76", doi = "https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.3.1.04hoc", url = "https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jhl.3.1.04hoc", publisher = "John Benjamins", issn = "2210-2116", type = "Journal Article", keywords = "relative clauses", keywords = "Proto-Indo-European", keywords = "word order", keywords = "syntactic reconstruction", keywords = "prosody", abstract = "Although the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European as verb-final is widely accepted, there continue to be dissenting opinions (e.g. Friedrich 1975). See e.g. Pires & Thomason (2008), who question the fruitfulness of Indo-European syntactic reconstruction. In this article I address two issues: First, the reconstructable subordination strategies, including relative-correlative structures, are perfectly in conformity with verb-final typology — pace Lehmann (1974) and Friedrich (1975) who considered relative clauses with finite verbs and relative pronouns incompatible with SOV. Second, verb-final reconstruction makes it possible to account for prosodic and segmental changes that single out finite verbs, such as the non-accentuation of Vedic finite verbs and i-apocope preferentially targeting finite verbs in Italic, Celtic, and Baltic-Slavic. Both developments find a natural, prosodically motivated explanation if we accept PIE as SOV, but not if we do not accept that reconstruction. These facts show that, pace Pires & Thomason (2008), the reconstruction of PIE as verb-final is a fruitful hypothesis.", }