Did Lycian adopt a new clause structure in place of inherited -r-passives?

Abstract

Abstract The corpora of the IE Anatolian languages vary widely in script, legibility, size, date, subject matter, and in the extent to which we understand them. Four syntactic features which they appear to have inherited are: a S(ubject)- O(bject)-V(erb) clause structure; declined anaphoric pronouns attached enclitically to a clause’s first accented element; the ability to move the object or verb to the start of a clause for emphasis (“fronting”); the option not to enforce case and number agreement among more than two coordinated elements. The discovery of the Lycian languages and our current understanding of them is summarised. It is proposed, although the evidence comes primarily from Lycian A: that languages of the southwest Luwic area, namely, the alphabetically written Carian and the two from Lycia, had changed to a basic SVO clause; that Lycian A, and probably B too, abandoned the inherited medio-passive conjugations in -r-, which are absent from their corpora; that the passive preterite was expressed by a periphrastic OVS construction with fronted direct object, then me and a particle chain starting with the n- found clause-initially in Hittite but absent from other Luwic dialects, then innovatively appending *-an to the verb, and with the subject last.