The Proto-Indo-European case system and its reflexes in a diachronic typological perspective: Evidence for the linguistic prehistory of Eurasia

Kulikov, Leonid [UCL]

The present paper outlines a diachronic typology of changes in case systems within the Indo-European linguistic family. This study is written in the genre of identification and definition of problem: I will not attempt to offer an exhaustive treatment of the subject. Rather, I would like to draw attention to the importance of extensive research in this field in a diachronic typological perspective, which, in my opinion, may shed light on reconstruction of the linguistic prehistory of Eurasia. First, I will summarize some well-known facts about the Indo-European case and the variety of reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European case system, outlining the most important tendencies – without entering into a discussion of details of the individual case systems as well as into details of the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction. In the second part of the paper I will make an attempt to explain some of the attested developments of the original case system as resulting from contacts with non-Indo-European languages. This, in turn, will enable us to make some hypotheses about the case systems and, in general, structural types of some non-documented substrate languages which could have triggered these changes.