Linguistic typology and reconstruction: The animacy hierarchy and its implications for the Indo-European inflectional number category

Abstract

Typological considerations have recently come to play an important role in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. This paper explores the use of the so-called animacy hierarchy as a means of illuminating the status of the grammatical category of number in both verbal and nominal paradigms just prior to the dissolution of the Indo-European speech community. Specifically, on the basis of extant data, the animacy hierarchy implies that the late Indo-European conjugational system included a general (first/second/third person) plural marker and that animate nouns, though not inanimate nouns, were regularly inflected for number.