 previous article in this issue | next article in this issue  |
Preview first page |
Document Details : Title: Wackernagel's Law in Classical Armenian Author(s): VAUX, B. Journal: Revue des Études Arméniennes Volume: 25 Date: 1994-1995 Pages: 17-42 DOI: 10.2143/REA.25.0.2003772 Abstract : Classical Armenian displays a curious type of subordinate clause formation characterized by the addition of a cliticized anaphoric pronoun to the end of the first constituent within the subordinate clause. Meillet (1897-1898) first proposed that this process was an instance of Wackernagel’s Law, which encompasses a range of syntactic second-position phenomena in the world’s languages. In this paper I survey the distribution of Wackernagel clauses in Armenian, and provide an account for their behavior within the framework of current syntactic theory. More specifically, I show that the constraints on what elements may serve as host for the clitic and where the finite verb and adverbs in the subordinate clause may surface follow naturally from independently motivated principles of recent generative syntactic theory. |
|
