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Diachronic Development of Grammatical Agreenebt in Four Inflecting Indo-European Languages

Research into agreement systems has produced significant, typologically sound results, although these have so far mostly been limited to synchronic findings. In the research project, the development of congruence systems was systematically traced for the first time using original texts from languages that have been attested over a long period of time. The Indo-European languages are particularly suitable for this because of their long written tradition and the well-developed syntactic agreement system. Four languages with a representative distribution and various changes in their agreement systems were used as objects of study:

• German
• Ancient Greek
• Hittite
• Cymric.

In the four languages, an investigation of agreement relations in texts from different time periods were carried out in order to gather reliable information on the diachronic development of congruence systems. On the one hand, certain texts (excerpts) are analyzed exhaustively, on the other hand, cases of non-canonical congruence, which allow particularly interesting insights into the functioning of congruence systems, were systematically searched for and evaluated in other text (excerpts). From a historical perspective, the data collected provided important clues for the verification of the generalizations derived from synchronic findings.

From October 4th – 6th, 2012, an international workshop “Agreement from a diachronic perspective” took place in Marburg as part of the project. Find more  information .

Application: J. Fleischer, E. Rieken, P. Widmer

Cooperation partners: E. Poppe, G. Corbett (University of Surrey)

Funding institution: German Research Foundation (DFG); 

Duration: 3 years

Project Staff: Magnus Breder Birkenes, Cyril Brosch, Kerstin Plein, Florian Sommer, David Sasseville