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From a Non-Argument-Dative to an Argument-Dative: The Character and Origin of the qṭīl lī Construction in Syriac and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic

Summary

The paper asks where the Eastern Aramaic qṭīl lī pattern came from. In this pattern a passive participle combines with the preposition l- plus a pronoun, and it later became the ergative-like past tense of many Neo-Aramaic dialects. Since Kutscher (1965), following Benveniste's analysis of Old Persian, scholars have usually treated it as a "possessive perfect" borrowed through Persian contact. Using data from Syriac and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (JBA), the author analyses the construction piece by piece. He argues that it is an ordinary passive. The participle alone carries tense and aspect, and the l- phrase marks the agent. Diachronically, the dative first marked an experiencer that was not an argument of the verb. With certain verbs, especially in passives, this dative was reinterpreted as the agent argument. In JBA, definite arguments must be echoed by an anticipatory pronoun on the verb, and this agreement later developed into the new verbal inflection. The parallel developments in Iranian are explained as convergence rather than one-way borrowing. The study matters for typology of possessive perfects, the rise of ergativity, and testing the argument/adjunct split.

Key points

  • Rejected view: Kutscher (1965) analysed qṭīl lī as a possessive construction expressing the perfect, partly modelled on Benveniste's (1952) reading of the Old Persian participle plus genitive-dative.
  • Synchronic claims:
    • Perfect meaning comes from the passive participle by itself, not from the whole construction.
    • An l- agent can appear in passive clauses of any tense.
  • Neo-Aramaic outcome: In the dialect of Challa, the cliticized descendants form a full preterite paradigm, e.g. grešli 'I pulled', grešle, grešlu (Fassberg 2010).
  • JBA argument/adjunct test: In JBA, definite prepositional arguments are co-indexed by an anticipatory pronoun next to the verb (the "verb construction"). Definite adjuncts instead take the relative d- (the "d-construction"). The two patterns are in complementary distribution.
  • Typology and convergence:
    • The result supports the claim that possessive perfects are rare outside European and Indo-European languages.
    • Old Persian shows a parallel experiencer genitive, e.g. "then it is known to you", which suggests a truly parallel development rather than borrowing.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Instead of assigning meaning to a whole periphrastic pattern, the author asks which component contributes which part (participle gives tense, preposition gives agent), which avoids positing unnecessary constructions. — For Mova (frames): When mapping UD trees to frames, assign tense/aspect and role labels per token (participle, oblique case marker) before assuming a multiword construction, keeping each inference traceable.
  • I2. A grammatical distribution can serve as a diagnostic for argumenthood: definite arguments trigger pronoun agreement while adjuncts take a relative marker. — For Mova (tree): Similar overt cues (e.g., English do-so tests, preposition stranding patterns) could help decide obl vs. obj/iobj-like attachments and sanity-check parser output on argument/adjunct ambiguity.
  • I3. Semantics, not syntactic status, licenses the dative: an experiencer reading permits the dative even where syntax would predict otherwise. — For Mova (frames): Role assignment from VerbNet could prefer a semantic experiencer check over a purely positional one when handling "to"-phrases with perception and knowledge verbs ("it is known to you").
  • I4. The shift from non-argument to agent shows how a peripheral participant can be reanalysed as a core role in passives. — For Mova (frames): Passive "by"/"to" obliques could be explicitly mapped back to active-voice agent or experiencer slots, so "who did what to whom" stays stable across voice alternations.
  • I5. The author separates convergence from directional borrowing and refuses to infer a source when two languages develop in parallel. — For Mova (learn): When several witness parsers agree, the agreement should not be read as independent confirmation if the parsers share training sources; negative controls can test for such shared bias.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{siegal2026non,
  title = {{From a Non-Argument-Dative to an Argument-Dative: The Character and Origin of the qṭīl lī Construction in Syriac and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic}},
  author = {Siegal, Elitzur A. Bar-Asher},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 51},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/6856}
}

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