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date: 15 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines the application of the constructional approach to syntactic reconstruction. It argues that a constructional approach to language is an optimal theoretical framework for reconstructing syntax, and explains that a constructional approach overcomes some of the alleged difficulties with syntactic reconstruction. The chapter outlines the basic premises of historical-comparative reconstruction and how the comparative method works in practice. It also shows how Construction Grammar may contribute to historical-comparative syntactic reconstruction by reconstructing one particular argument structure construction for Proto-Indo-European language.

Keywords: syntactic reconstruction, constructional approach, historical-comparative reconstruction, comparative method, Construction Grammar, Proto-Indo-European

Jóhanna Barðdal

Jóhanna Barðdal is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Bergen. She has worked on case marking, oblique subjects, grammatical relations, constructional semantics, and syntactic productivity in a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Her last book Productivity: Evidence from Case and Argument Structure in Icelandic was published by Benjamins in 2008. She has published articles in Nordic Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Linguistics, Language, Morphology, Linguistics, Lingua, and Diachronica. She is a founding coeditor of the Journal of Historical Linguistics. She is currently running a large research project on noncanonical subject marking in the early and archaic Indo-European languages, funded by the University of Bergen, Bergen Research Foundation, and the Norwegian Research Council.

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