The Story of ‘Woe’

Friday January 17, 2013 at 14:15 – 16:00 (HF: 217)

In contrast to the received consensus in the historical-comparative linguistic community, we argue that syntactic reconstruction is both a plausible and a feasible enterprise. We illustrate this with an investigation of the syntactic behavior of *wai ‘woe’ across five subbranches of Indo-European, i.e. Indo-Iranian, Italic, Baltic, Slavic and Germanic. The adverbial interjection *wai ‘woe’ is found instantiating three different constructions, which we label: 1) the Bare Exclamative Construction, 2) the Dative Exclamative Construction, and 3) the Predicative Construction. We suggest that the Predicative Construction is archaic in the Indo- European languages, and that the Dative Exclamative Construction has developed from a focalized variant of the Predicative Construction, used in exclamatory context, since ‘woe’ is the quintessential candidate for being focused in situations of adversity. On the basis of the comparative evidence, all three constructions must be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, as well as a subject–verb construction, which determines the default word order properties between the subject and the verb, and finally a focus construction where focalized material occurs in first position. We couch our analysis within the formalism of Sign-Based Construction Grammar, establishing beyond doubt that syntactic reconstruction is a viable endeavor within historical-comparative linguistics.

Jóhanna Barðdal, Valgerður Bjarnadóttir, Serena Danesi, Tonya Kim Dewey, Thórhallur Eythórsson, Chiara Fedriani & Thomas Smitherman