A0218
Dag Trygve Truslew HAUG
Syntactic Conditions on Null Arguments in IE Bible Translations
This paper deals with the comparative evidence for null arguments as offered by the
Indo-European translations of the New Testament. While null subjects in the
translations seem to just follow the Greek (Greek null subjects correspond to Armenian
null subjects in 94.2% of the cases; the other numbers are 96.3% for Gothic; 97.9% for
Slavic and 97.0% for Latin—all languages have several thousand examples), the
evidence from pro-objects is more interesting.
Pro-objects in Greek are of two kinds, discourse conditioned (which are becoming
rare in the NT) and syntactically conditioned (Luraghi 2003), the two most common
versions of which are object sharing between conjuncts in coordination (conjunction
reduction) and between a predicative participle and its matrix verb (argument sharing).
Both constructions are live in NT Greek, where we find 108 examples of conjunction
reduction and 50 examples of argument sharing in the Gospels (64259 words in all).
While the Gothic and the OCS translations follow the same pattern as Greek and
therefore do not show anything, Latin and Armenian apparently try to eliminate
argument sharing. There are only 18 examples of argument sharing in 58967 Latin
words, but a similar amount of conjunction reduction (99 ex) as in Greek.
In Haug (forthcoming) I argue that predicative participles can be divided into three
types on the basis of their information structural behaviour: they are either elaborations
on the matrix predicate; or frames serving to locate the matrix predicate spatiotemporally; or they are independent rhematic information. The first two types
correspond to subordinated adverbial clauses (manner/instrument and temporal
respectively), whereas the latter is closer to coordination. I show that argument sharing
only occurs in the latter type. Thus, syntactic licensing of null objects essentially
reduces to coordination and I argue that this is the only type we should reconstruct for
Indo-European.
Haug, D. (forthcoming) Open verb-based adjuncts in New Testament Greek and the
Latin of
the Vulgate
, in Fabricius-Hansen, C. and D. Haug (eds.) Big Events and Small Clauses, to appear.
Luraghi, S. 2003. Definite referential null objects in Ancient Greek. IF 108:169-196.
Workshop title
The Diachrony of Referential Null Arguments
Dag Trygve Truslew HAUG daghaug@ifikk.uio.no