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. 

Among Semitic reciprocal constructions, a division is seen between two types: 1) two-unit constructions, with two components, each filling a different argument position of the verb, and 2) one-unit constructions, with an anaphora that co-refers with the subject (that must be plural) and occupies only the non-subject position required by the verb. The goal of this paper is to explain how these constructions developed, specifically: 1) how did the various types of two-unit constructions evolve? and 2) could diachronic chains be identified in order to explain the development of the one-unit constructions from the two-unit constructions? Previous work on question (1) focuses on the range of phrases that tend to develop into reciprocal markers. Such accounts, however, do not explain how these constructions developed the specific meanings they have. I argue that consideration of the semantics of these constructions is crucial for understanding their evolution. Instead of ‘reciprocal constructions’ it is better to see them as denoting ‘unspecified relations’. As for (2), various attempts have been made to explain such processes focusing on Indo-European languages, which do not capture the Semitic developments; therefore I propose an alternative hypothesis, according to which the one-unit constructions result from a reanalysis of the two-unit constructions.

This study uses typological surveys of predicative possessive constructions across languages and illustrates how a typological study may contribute to a historical discussion. More specifically it provides an account of such constructions in the history of Akkadian. The typological surveys reveal that various constructions in Akkadian not only connote possession accidently, but rather are tokens of predicative possessive constructions. Thus, this article provides a synchronic survey of different marginal predicative possessive constructions in Akkadian, of different dialects and from different periods, most of them unnoticed in the literature. Second, once these constructions are identified, assuming their existence in the history of a language may contribute to explaining other related phenomena, either as motivations for certain diachronic developments or as historical syntactic/semantic explanations for other phenomena. In the context of Akkadian, it will be first and foremost used to explain the origin of the Akkadian verb išûm, the equivalent of the English verb ‘to have’, as Akkadian is unique among the Semitic languages in having a finite verb for this function.