Syntax and syntactic reconstruction

Syntactic reconstruction is by far one of the most understudied domain of both former and contemporary historical syntax, for various reasons. These include the alleged lack of cognates, arbitrariness, directionality, simple form–meaning correspondences, as well as the alleged lack of continuous transmission of grammar across generations, all of which have been rebutted by pioneering forces within the field, ever since the beginning of the Comparative Method. Recently, an increased interest in syntactic reconstruction has sprung up in the community, among scholars of different theoretical persuasions alike, promising to evolve into a larger movement within the field. The procedure of syntactic reconstruction consists of a number of steps, including identifying cognates, setting up correspondence sets, distinguishing between different layers of historical data, all in order to chose between competing hypotheses about the relative chronology of the dataset under investigation. This is illustrated with a case study of different valency patterns in the early and archaic Indo-European languages, where it is hypothesized that a set of oblique subject case frames have been innovated in the Western branch of the Indo-European language family, based on comparative evidence involving a diachronic process of detransitivization