Change and Continuity in the Subcategorization of Indo-european Middle-passive Verbs

Ancient Greek (Gk) middle verbs of fear (e.g. fobeisthai ‘to be afraid’), as Indo-European (IE) deponents in general, seem not to undergo Burzio’s Generalization [3] in its strong version, according to which verbs that lack an agentive external argument should block accusative assigning on their complement. On the contrary, Gk middle verbs of fear take accusative objects (ex. 1, structure A). In this respect, Gk seems to have replaced with a plain accusative complement the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) ablative case of “departure” or “source”, usually reconstructed for the objects of the verbs of fear [2, 6, 8, 9], as seen in Sanskrit, Avestan, Baltic, and Slavic (ex. 2). On the other hand, Old Church Slavonic (OCS) and other Slavic languages (Old Russian) conserved the PIE ablative case (its uses were conflated with the ones of genitive case in Greek and Slavic) on the objects of the verbs of “fear” (e.g. bojati sę ‘to be afraid’), observing Burzio’s Generalization, which predicts that verbs that lack an agentive subject, cannot assign accusative case to their objects (ex. 3, structure B). Finally, both languages have innovated with respect to PIE in that they made occasional use of the mechanism of replacing the PIE ablative-genitive case with a PP headed by an overt preposition [1, 6] (ex. 4).