This volume is an important contribution to the diachrony of non-canonical subjects in a typological perspective. The questions addressed concern the internal mechanisms and triggers for various changes that non-canonical subjects undergo, ranging from semantic motivations to purely structural explanations. The discussion encompasses the whole life-cycle of non-canonical subjects: from their emergence out of non-subject arguments to their expansion, demise or canonicization, focusing primarily on syntactic changes and changes in case-marking. The volume offers a number of different case studies comprising such languages as Italian, Spanish, Old Norse and Russian as well as languages less studied in this context, such as Latin, Classical Armenian, Baltic languages and some East Caucasian languages. Typological generalizations in the form of recurrent developmental paths are offered on the basis of data presented in this volume and in the literature.

This volume analyzes constructions with non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically, drawing on insights from cognitive and discourse-functional linguistics. Prototypical subjects have often been characterized in terms of their semantic, syntactic and discourse features, such as animacy, agentivity, topicality, referentiality, definiteness and autonomy of existence of the subject referent. A non-canonical subject is one that lacks some of these features. This may be reflected in its meaning, grammatical coding, and/or discourse function. In discussing non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically, the chapters in the volume address the following more general topics: What kinds of grammatical, semantic and discourse criteria can be used to distinguish subjects from non-subjects? To what extent are subject criteria construction-specific? What kinds of constructions have non-canonical subjects? What are the semantic and discourse functions of constructions with non-canonical subjects? Are subjects which are grammatically non-canonical also atypical in terms of their discourse features?

Capitalizing on the by now widely accepted idea of the construction-specific and language-specific nature of grammatical relations, the editors of the volume developed a modern framework for systematically capturing all sorts of variations in grammatical relations. The central concepts of this framework are the notions of argument role and its referential properties, argument selector, as well as various conditions on argument selections. The contributors of the volume applied this framework in their descriptions of grammatical relations in individual languages and discussed its limitations and advantages. This resulted in a coherent description of grammatical relations in thirteen genealogically and geographically diverse languages based on original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages. The volume presents a far more detailed picture of the diversity of argument selectors and effects of predicates, referential properties of arguments, as well as of various clausal conditions on grammatical relations than previously published grammatical descriptions.

The third volume in the VARGReB series explores different aspects of varying argument realization in Baltic. It presents original studies on differential marking of both core and non-core verbal arguments, on argument structures of nouns and the encoding of nominal arguments, as well as on constructions reflecting the expansion of argument structure through the addition of causative, resultative or applicative predications. The discussion of phenomena of argument realization and marking often touches on fundamental problems of syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, such as the putative locality of case assignment, event-structural factors determining case marking, the inheritance of argument structure across phrase types, or the status of arguments and adjuncts. The contributions to this volume use different approaches and frameworks to analyze a wealth of authentic data from contemporary Latvian and Lithuanian.

Interest in non-canonically case-marked subjects has been unceasing since the groundbreaking work of Andrews and Masica in the late 70’s who were the first to document the existence of syntactic subjects in another morphological case than the nominative. Their research was focused on Icelandic and South-Asian languages, respectively, and since then, oblique subjects have been reported for language after language throughout the world. This newfangled recognition of the concept of oblique subjects at the time was followed by discussions of the role and validity of subject tests, discussions of the verbal semantics involved, as well as discussions of the theoretical implications of this case marking strategy of syntactic subjects. This volume contributes to all these debates, making available research articles on different languages and language families, additionally highlighting issues like language contact, differential subject marking and the origin of oblique subjects.

While there are languages that code a particular grammatical role (e.g. subject or direct object) in one and the same way across the board, many more languages code the same grammatical roles differentially. The variables which condition the differential argument marking (or DAM) pertain to various properties of the NP (such as animacy or definiteness) or to event semantics or various properties of the clause. While the main line of current research on DAM is mainly synchronic the volume tackles the diachronic perspective. The tenet is that the emergence and the development of differential marking systems provide a different kind of evidence for the understanding of the phenomenon. The present volume consists of 18 chapters and primarily brings together diachronic case studies on particular languages or language groups including e.g. Finno-Ugric, Sino-Tibetan and Japonic languages. The volume also includes a position paper, which provides an overview of the typology of different subtypes of DAM systems, a chapter on computer simulation of the emergence of DAM and a chapter devoted to the cross-linguistic effects of referential hierarchies on DAM.

Theoretical studies of Latvian grammar have a great deal to offer to contemporary linguistics. Although traditionally Lithuanian has been the most widely studied Baltic language in diachronic and synchronic linguistics alike, Latvian has a number of distinctive features that can prove valuable both for historical, and perhaps even more so, for synchronic language research. Therefore, at the very least, contemporary typological, areal, and language contact studies involving Baltic languages should account for data from Latvian. Typologically, Latvian grammar is a classic Indo-European (Baltic) system with well-developed inflection and derivation. However, it also bears certain similarities to the Finno-Ugric languages, which can be reasonably explained by its areal and historical background. This applies, for example, to the mood system and its connections with modality and evidentiality in Latvian, also to the correlation between aspect and quantity as manifested in verbal and nominal (case) forms. The relations between debitive mood, certain constructions with reflexive verbs, and voice in Latvian are intriguing examples of unusual morphosyntactic features. Accordingly, the book focuses on the following topics: case system and declension (with emphasis on the polyfunctionality of case forms), gender, conjugation, tense and personal forms, aspect, mood, modality and evidentiality, reflexive verbs, and voice. The examples included in this book have been taken from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian (Lidzsvarots musdienu latviešu valodas tekstu korpuss, available at www.korpuss.lv), www.google.lv, mass media, and fiction texts (see the List of language sources) without regard to relative frequency ratios.