PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The typology of person prominence investigates the role of animacy with respect to the assignment of syntactic functions in different languages. Some languages tend to assign higher syntactic functions to animates, whereas in other languages the assignment of syntactic functions is not controlled by this feature. Syntactic change in a number of Western Indo-European languages has been shown to be influenced by this typological property of person prominence. In the present paper we examine the history of some sample constructions in Greek: predication of possession, modal constructions and experiencer constructions. Empirical evidence in these domains shows that Greek remains typologically stable with respect to person prominence. This conspicuous difference of Greek in comparison to the other members of the same family is interpreted as a consequence of its syntactic properties regarding case assignment and word order.