Publisher's Synopsis
The authors of this volume analyze Older Egyptian, Coptic, Sumerian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Classical Greek, Latin, and Classical Sanskrit as instantiations of Universal Grammar, which enables them to explain descriptive problems that proved to be unsolvable for traditional, inductive approaches. The ancient languages examined, some of which were spoken as much as 5000 years ago, also provide crucial new data for syntactic and morphosyntactic theory - concerning e.g. discourse-motivated movement operations, the correlation of movement and agreement, a shift from lexical case to structural case marking, the licensing of structural case in infinitives, the structure of coordinated phrases, possessive constructions with an external possessor, and the role of event structure in syntax.
