Alignment Change and the Emergence of the Thematic Conjugation from Proto-Indo-European to Indo-European: A Wedding of Hypotheses*

Abstract

Our paper addresses the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) case and alignment system and questions the hypothesis that PIE had nominative-accusative alignment. We argue that the rise of split-gender ergativity in Anatolian was prompted by the fact that proto-neuter nouns like *doru were not used in A-function before Proto-Anatolian (Yakubovich 2011). Our first hypothesis is that neuter nouns changed their alignment to S = P = A only after the separation of the Anatolian branch. We further reassess the theory of 'protomiddle' origin of the thematic conjugation (Watkins 1969; Jasanoff 1998). We propose a wedding of hypotheses by combining the idea of alignment change with this theory. This includes the reconstruction of a PIE antipassive construction, as recently outlined by Pooth et al. (2019). The scenario implies that PIE had semantic alignment, and that the voice opposition was triggered by prototypical agency and transitivity in semantic terms (Pooth 2011; Pooth et al. 2019).