Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo-Aryan Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics Series

This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi. Uta Reinöhl focuses specifically on the rise of configurational structure as a by-product of the grammaticalization of postpositions: while Vedic Sanskrit lacks function words that constrain nominal expressions into phrasal units - one of the characteristics of a non-configurational language - New Indo-Aryan languages have postpositions which organize nominal expressions into postpositional phrases. The grammaticalization of postpositions and the concomitant syntactic changes are traced through the three millennia of Indo-Aryan attested history with a focus on Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic Pali and Apabhramsha, Early New Indic Old Awadhi, and finally Hindi. Among the topics discussed are the constructions in which the postpositions grammaticalize, the origins of the postpositional template, and the paradigmatization of the various elements involved into a single functional class of postpositions. The book outlines how it is semantic and pragmatic changes that induce changes on the expression side, ultimately resulting in the establishment of phrasal, and thus low-level configurational, syntax.

Uta Reinöhl studied General Linguistics, Philosophy, and English Literature at University College Dublin and at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. She has been affiliated with the University of Cologne since 2010, and has been Assistant Professor in the Department of General Linguistics there since 2013. She wrote her dissertation on the rise of configurationality in Indo-Aryan, for which she received the Wilhelm von Humboldt Award 2015 of the German Linguistic Society as well as an award from the German National Academic Foundation.