‘Hungering and Lusting for Women and Fleshly Delicacies’: Reconstructing Grammatical Relations for Proto‐Germanic*

Abstract

AbstractSyntactic reconstruction has long been virtually outlawed in historical‐comparative research, more or less ever since Watkins’s influential works on the problems of reconstructing word order for Proto‐Indo‐European. Recently, through the emergence of Construction Grammar, where complex syntactic structures are regarded as form–function pairings, a resurgence of syntactic reconstruction is made possible, as complex syntactic structures become a legitimate object of the Comparative Method. Given the legitimacy of syntactic reconstruction, and hence the possible reconstruction of argument‐structure constructions, a major question arises as to whether grammatical relations are also reconstructable for earlier undocumented language periods. We argue that if the constructions singling out grammatical relations can be reconstructed for a proto‐branch, the grammatical relations following from these are also reconstructable for that proto‐branch. In order to illustrate our methodology, we show how a reconstruction of the subject function in Proto‐Germanic may be carried out, more specifically of oblique‐subject predicates like ‘hunger’, ‘thirst’ and ‘lust’, based on the subject properties found in the earliest Germanic daughter languages.