The typology of non-canonical subjects

Workshop proposal for ALT 2026, Lyon

convenors: Pierre-Yves Modicom, Joren Somers & Jóhanna Barðdal

Please submit your abstract of one page, excluding references, to

pierre-yves.modicom (AT) univ-lyon3.fr

before April 26th, 2025.

At least since Keenan (1976), prototypical subjects have been defined in terms of coding and behavioral properties, such as case marking, clause-initial position, subject-verb inversion, conjunction reduction, raising, and control. These have been successfully applied to several languages and have thus led to the discovery of non-canonically case-marked subjects, starting with Icelandic (Andrews 1976, Thráinsson 1976, inter alia) and the South Asian languages (Masica 1976, Kachru, Kachru & Bhatia 1976, inter alia). Later, such non-nominative subjects have been documented in additional Germanic languages like Faroese (Barnes 1986) and German (Barðdal 2006, Somers et al. 2025, inter alia), alongside a substantial body of work on the early Germanic languages, like Gothic, Old English, Old Saxon, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle High German (cf. Barðdal 2023 and the references therein).

        Additional Indo-European languages featuring non-nominative subjects are Russian (Moore & Perlmutter 2000), Old French (Mathieu 2006), Romanian (Ilioaia 2023), and Latin and Ancient Greek (Barðdal et al. 2023, Cluyse, Somers & Barðdal 2025). Non-nominative subjects have also been documented in further languages around the globe, such as Japanese (Shibatani 1999) and Korean (Yoon 2004), Hebrew (Landau 2009, Pat-El 2018), native American languages (Hermon 1985), the Dravidian languages (Verma & Mohanan 1990), the Dardic languages (Steever 1998), the Tibeto-Burman languages (Bickel 2004) and the Cariban languages (Castro Alves 2018).

Today, 50 years after Keenan’s monumental work, the aim of this workshop is to once more bring non-nominative subjects to the fore and to specifically focus on:

• the cross-linguistic typology of subjects

  the status of subject criteria in language comparison

  theories of argument structure and valency, e.g. lexical vs. non-lexical theories of argument structure constructions

  the mapping between semantic roles, information status and syntactic coding of subject arguments

  the similarities and differences between phenomena such as differential subject marking and split alignment across languages

The workshop is also open to any typological contribution to the following issues:

• the semantic motivation behind i) non-canonical case marking of subjects, ii) valency alternation in the selection of subject arguments iii) split alignment or iv) differential subject marking

  non-canonical subjects in languages with alignment systems other than nominative–accusative

  syntactic alternations involving non-nominative subjects, like oblique anticausativization (cf. Barðdal et al. 2020)

  alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat or Acc-Nom/Nom-Acc predicates

  non-canonically case-marked subjects in non-case languages, like Dutch (cf. Somers 2023)

  morphological variation in subject case marking

  the emergence, evolution and loss of non-canonical subjects in language history

References

Allen, Cynthia L. 1995. Case marking and reanalysis: Grammatical relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Andrews, Avery D. 1976. The VP complement analysis in Modern Icelandic. North Eastern  Linguistic Society 6. 1–21.

Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2006. Construction-specific properties of syntactic subjects in Icelandic and German. Cognitive Linguistics 17(1). 39–106.

Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2023. Oblique subjects in Germanic: Their status, history and reconstruction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Barðdal, Jóhanna, Eleonora Cattafi, Serena Danesi, Laura Bruno & Leonardo Biondo. 2023.  Non-nominative subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek: Applying the subject tests on Early Indo-European languages. Indogermanische Forschungen 128: 321–392.

Barðdal, Jóhanna, Leonid Kulikov, Roland Pooth & Peter Alexander Kerkhof. 2020. Oblique anticausatives: A morphosyntactic isogloss in Indo-European. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 56(3): 413–449.

Barnes, Michael. 1986. Subject, nominative and oblique case in Faroese. Scripta Islandica 38: 3–35.

Bickel, Balthasar. 2004. The syntax of experiencers in the Himalayas. In Peri Bhaskararao & Karumuri V. Subbarao (eds.), Non-Nominative Subjects I, 77–111. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Castro Alves, Flavia de. 2018. Sujeito dativo em Canela [Dative subjects in Canela]. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi: Ciências Humanas 13(2). 377–403.

Cluyse, Brian, Joren Somers & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2025. Latin placēre as an alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verb: A radically new analysis. Indogermanische Forschungen 130 (in press).

Hermon, Gabriella. 1985. Syntactic Modularity. Dordrecht: Foris.

Ilioaia, Mihaela. 2023. MIHI EST construction: An instance of non-canonical subject marking in Romanian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kachru, Yamuna, Braj B. Kachru & Tej K. Bhatia. 1976. The notion 'Subject': A note on Hindi-Urdu, Kashmiri and Punjabi. The Notion of Subject in South Asian Languages, ed. by M. K. Verma. Madison: University of Wisconsin.

Keenan, Edward L. 1976. Towards a universal definition of subject. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic, 303–333. New York: Academic Press.

Landau, Idan. 2009. The locative syntax of experiencers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Masica, Colin P. 1976. Defining a linguistic area: South Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mathieu, Eric. 2006. Quirky subjects in Old French. Studia Linguistica 60(3): 282–312.

Moore, John & David M. Perlmutter. 2000. What Does it Take to Be a Dative Subject? Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18: 373–416.

Pat-El, Na’ama. 2018. The diachrony of non-canonical subjects in Northwest Semitic. Non-canonical subjects: The Reykjavík-Eyjafjallajökull papers, ed. by Jóhanna Barðdal, Na’ama Pat-El & Stephen Mark Carey, 159–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1999. Dative Subject Constructions Twenty-Two Years Later. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 29(2): 45–76.

Somers, Joren. 2023. Oblieke subjecten in het Nederlands? De casus ‘wachten’. Nederlandse Taalkunde 28(3): 350–364.

Somers, Joren, Torsten Leuschner, Ludovic De Cuypere & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2025. A Corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 44 (in press).

Steever, Sanford B. (ed.). 1998. The Dravidian Languages. London: Routledge.

Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1979. On Complementation in Icelandic. New York: Garland.

Verma, M. K. & K. P. Mohanan (eds.). 1990. Experiencer Subjects in South Asian Languages. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Yoon, James H. 2004. Non-nominative (major) subjects and case stacking in Korean. Non-Nominative Subjects 2, ed. by Peri Bhaskararao & Karumuri Venkata Subbarao, 265–314. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.