160159 VO Indo-European Syntax (2017W)

The course will cover a selection of topics connected to the study of the syntax of ancient Indo-European languages, as well as the syntactic reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. The topics covered include general theoretical questions, such as the methodology involved in the syntactic analysis of corpus languages, theories of syntactic change and syntactic reconstruction, as well as an overview of specific syntactic aspects of the ancient Indo-European languages, including case syntax, alignment, clitics, etc. The lectures will be supplemented by readings that will be made available via Moodle.

Since the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European syntax is still at a relatively immature stage, the main goal of this course is to enable students to evaluate the evidence from the daughter languages and understand the methodological challenges involved in syntactic reconstruction.