Slavic "quirky subject" constructions with Ä“-statives: Origin and development

Abstract

The paper discusses the origin and the development of the constructions with Ä“-statives denoting sensation, emotion, perception and cognition, which exhibit traces of non-nominative alignment in the history of Slavic languages. The patterns where the experiencer is encoded by the accusative or the dative case were inherited from an earlier semantically aligned system, whose relics are found in other Indo-European languages as well. They have been subjected to various syntactic, morphological and semantic changesin the history of Slavic, leading to the establishment of transitive constructionsthus the strengthening of syntactic alignment. The analysis shows that the pace of this process and the types of changes that Ä“-stative constructions were subjected to were determined by the level of participant’s volitivity and/or control.