Berthold Delbrück, Historical and Comparative Indo-European Syntax 1922–2022

Short Description

This volume contains some important studies on syntax of Indo-European languages presented at the Delbrück Symposium on Indo-European Syntax on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Berthold Delbrück's death in 2022. The book, which can be considered one of the results of a research project of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellowship (Università degli Studi di Verona), provides an overview of the current state of research on diachronic and historical syntax within Indo-European studies and highlights the changing legacy of a great researcher within specific language branches and syntactic categories.

Description

Berthold Delbrück is considered the founding father of comparative and Indo-European syntax. His works provided the first detailed studies into several syntactic topics, such as tense, aspect and mood, word order, agreement and case functions to name only a few, in the ancient Indo-European languages known at that time, with a particular emphasis on Greek and Sanskrit. On the occasion of the centenary of his death in 2022, an honorary conference on comparative Indo-European syntax was organised in Verona within the framework of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Project Particles in Greek and Hittite as Expression of Mood and Modality (PaGHEMMo), which was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme Grant Agreement Number 101018097.
This conference not only addressed the already known languages but also studied the languages discovered after his death (the Anatolian languages, Tocharian) and the texts in already known languages discovered after his death (Mycenaean Greek) but also used new scientific methods and incorporated results from other (branches of linguistic) sciences. This book provides the proceedings of that conference. As was the case with Delbrück himself, several contributions, provided for by specialists in the individual languages, deal with Proto-Indo-European, Greek and Indo-Iranian but also Latin, Celtic, Tocharian, Albanian, Old-Prussian and the Anatolian languages are studied. The topics treated in this volume rank from tense, aspect and mood, case usage, agreement, word order, formulaic and poetic language, negation, language contact, and syntactic change. The volume starts with a historiographic essay on his method and its heritage in the history of syntactic theories and reconstruction and concludes with a syntactic description of Proto-Indo-European.
This work is one of the first volumes that gathers synchronic syntactic studies into many different, also non-classical, Indo-European languages (such as Albanian, Old-Prussian and Tocharian) and topics, that provides diachronic syntactical analyses and that ventures reconstructing (part of) the syntax of Proto-Indo-European. The volume will be beneficial for historical linguistics, classicists, scholars of lesser studied languages and languages of the Near-East, and linguistics in general.