Abstract:

This paper aims at tracing the origin of the emergence of a new tense in the history of Eastern Aramaic, the bases of which are the historical passive participle (qṭīl) with a conjugation that originated from a cliticization of a datival pronominal expression (lī). In many of the Eastern Neo Aramaic dialects the descendants of these forms exhibit features of an ergative system, in expressing the past tense. Studies often focus on the final stage of this process when the tense is established. The current paper, however, focuses on the previous stages of this diachronic process. Thus, it is about the origin of the use of the dative with the passive participle (the qṭīl lī construction) with a special interest in Syriac and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (=JBA). In the past scholars repeatedly argued that the use of the dative indicates that originally this was a “possessive-perfects”. In this paper I make the case that the qṭīl lī construction is definitely not a possessive one. Instead, I will argue, that this is a regular passive construction. Accordingly, the passive participle has the function of expressing the tense-aspect while the datival expression denotes the agent. In light of this, I propose that the use of the dative to denote the agent developed from its ability to mark a non argument experiencer. With certain verbs, particularly in passive constructions, it wasanalyzed as an argument-dative denoting the agent (in the sense of the subject of the active sentence). In this case we are dealing with a shift from a Non-Argument-Dative to an Argument-Dative. At the next stage, the requirement of anticipatory pronouns to agree with all definite arguments, laid the foundation for the new inflection in the Neo Eastern Aramaic dialects. Previous studies argued that the Aramaic development was a result of contact with Iranian languages. I point to a new parallelism between the development that occurred in the history of the Eastern Aramaic dialects and the development in some of the Iranian languages. I claim, however, that we are dealing with a case of “convergence” in the limited sense of the term, since languages in the same area, show similar developments through internal and external factors. The various discussions throughout the paper are of significance beyond the scope of the Aramaic construction for the following issues: 1) the cross-linguistic distribution of possessiveperfect constructions; 2) the origin of an ergative system; 3) the existence of a formal distinction between argument and adjunct; and 4) a presentation of a case of “convergence”. * This paper is a development of Bar-Asher (2008). I am grateful to Ariel Gutman for his translation of the original Hebrew into English. I dedicate this paper to the memory of Wolfhart Heinrichs, a great teacher and a wonderful person, with whom I discussed many parts of this paper.