Diachronica - Online First

This article discusses two case studies of diachronic “voice flipping” in which the syntax of a participle appears to change from active or “subject-oriented” to passive (Ancient Greek ‑menos to Modern Greek ‑menos) and from resultative/stative to active (Proto-Indo-European *-nt-; Hittite ‑ant‑ vs. Ancient Greek ‑nt‑). While the first type of change is the result of a diachronic reanalysis by which a functional projection (VoiceP) is lost, the second type in fact adds an active Voice head. Both changes are the result of the simultaneous availability of a stative and an eventive reading in deverbal adjectival forms and could belong to a larger “participle cycle”. However, unlike in other changes usually discussed under the label “cycle”, unidirectional economy principles do not apply in these cases. Rather, these cases provide evidence that some types of morphosyntactic change, especially those related to event and argument structure, are driven by reanalysis of the feature content of functional heads under local structural ambiguity.

A number of indigenous languages of northern Australia have complex systems of noun class prefixation incorporating the formal realization of case or topicality, as well as class. The markers of case and topicality occur inside the marking of class, in an unexpected position according to considerations of scope. In addition, where case is marked, zero marking is associated with oblique case roles while core roles are associated with substantive marking; again, an unexpected pattern given universals of case expression. We present evidence for the diachronic development of these noun class prefixation systems from an older system of demonstratives prefixed for class via a grammaticalization path: demonstrative > topic article > topic prefix. The class/topic prefixes then developed into class/case-marking prefixes through frequency correlations between topic, case, animacy and humanness. All stages in our reconstructed pathway are attested by extant languages.