Corno Stefano. Autour de la relation tête-dépendant dans les langues indo-européennes anciennes: typologie et reconstruction

École doctorale Sciences sociales (Lyon), 2016. — 405 p.The purpose of this work is to study co-variation mechanisms between the head of a nominal constituent and its dependent(s) in the following ancient Indo-European languages: Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic and Anatolian. By analysing in detail nominal and pronominal morphology within each of these groups, we shall determine which agreement classes are possible, and which ones are not, and define which role is played by desinential morphemes in the co-variation. In languages which distinguish three genders, inflectional classes are more numerous and either the head or the dependent bear the gender information, or neither, or both. However, when the dependent is a pronoun, the gender may be implied by the morphological type.We shall particularly focus on the agreement relations between head and dependent in core syntactic roles: A (transitive agent), P (patient) and U (unique participant in an intransitive construction). The marking of these roles is considerably different depending on whether the nouns are animate or inanimate. Animate nouns are marked in the same way in the four groups which are under scrutiny, whereas in the case of inanimate nouns Anatolian behaves in a drastically different way: the differential marking of A and U shows a limited capacity of inanimate nouns to become agents, which is also reflected in verbal indexation.The organisation shown by Anatolian is postulated as original in the field of Indo-European: the constraint of animation is decisive in becoming an agent.