Dative subjects in Gothic

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of potential dative subjects in Gothic, the earliest attested Germanic language, focusing in particular on word-order distribution in the Gothic Bible, the Skeireins, and the Bologna Fragment. This entails a comparison between affirmative clauses, negated clauses, and interrogative clauses, contrasting nominative subjects with potential dative subjects across both translated and native Gothic passages. We expand Ebel’s (1978) methodology to the Bologna Fragment in order to confirm which syntactic structures are native to Gothic. A comparison of the word order found with nominative subjects and potential dative subjects in native Gothic passages reveals that potential dative subjects pattern unambiguously with nominative subjects in several respects. Earlier research has documented that potential non-nominative subjects in Gothic pass the control infinitive test (Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012). Here we adduce further evidence for their subject status based on word order and a hitherto undocumented example of long-distance reflexivization.