Slavic "Quirky Subject" Constructions with ē-Statives: Origin and Development

Abstract:This paper discusses the origin and development of constructions with ē-statives denoting sensation, emotion, perception, and cognition, which exhibit traces of non-nominative alignment in the history of Slavic languages. Patterns where the experiencer is encoded by the accusative or dative case were inherited from an earlier semantically aligned system, whose relics are found in other Indo-European languages as well. These structures have been subjected to various syntactic, morphological, and semantic changes in the history of Slavic, leading to the establishment of transitive constructions and thus the strengthening of syntactic alignment. The analysis shows that the pace of this process and the types of changes that ē-stative constructions underwent were determined by the level of the participant's volitivity and control.