The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic

Eleanor Coghill studied Assyriology, Arabic, and Hebrew at the University of Cambridge, before specializing in the study of the endangered dialects of Neo-Aramaic, spoken in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Following a PhD and Junior Research Fellowship also at Cambridge, she worked on the Cambridge North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Project, documenting some of the huge dialectal diversity of the language. She has also investigated aspects of change in Aramaic, both short and long term. Between 2010 and 2015 she was at the Zukunftskolleg and Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, leading a project funded by the German Research Council on how the grammar of Neo-Aramaic dialects has been affected by contact with neighbouring languages. This was followed by a research position on the Language and Space project at the University of Zurich. As of 2016 she is Professor of Semitic Languages at Uppsala University.

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• Series preface Acknowledgements List of maps and tables Abbreviations and glosses Map 1: North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Dialects, Turoyo, and Mlahso 1: Introduction 2: Alignment 3: Aramaic 4: Alignment in Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects 5: The verbal system and alignment in earlier Eastern Aramaic 6: The origin and development of the Q.til li construction 7: The decline of ergative alignment and new developments 8: Conclusions Appendices Appendix A: All cases of Q.til li from the Syriac corpus Appendix B: Examples of Q.til li gathered from Syriac secondary sources and other miscellaneous examples Appendix C: Examples of Q.til li from Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Appendix D: Examples of Q.til li from Classical Mandaic Appendix E: Verb lexemes found in Prefix Conjugation forms in the Syriac Corpus References Index