Elena Shvedova (HSE University) Lability drift in Neo-Aramaic languages

In this talk, I examine labile verbs in Neo-Aramaic languages (< Semitic), focusing on diachrony and semantics. Labile verbs, which can be used both transitively and intransitively without morphological change, are widespread in Modern Aramaic languages, in contrast to earlier Aramaic varieties where  anticausative  or  causative  marking was more prevalent. The verbal system of Christian Urmi (< North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic) can illustrate this expansion of lability: I analyzed 1811 verbs from the dictionary (Khan 2016) and at least 172 of them are labile.
Neo-Aramaic languages can be divided into two main genealogical groups: Eastern and Western Aramaic, which separated during the first millennium BC. In my study I use data from both branches. I categorize Neo-Aramaic labile verbs into three groups based on their historical development: (1) verbs such as ‘freeze’, ‘fill’, and ‘begin’, which  retain  lability from earlier stages of Aramaic; (2) verbs such as ‘open’, ‘break’, and ‘close’, which transitioned from anticausative marking in Middle Aramaic to lability in Modern Aramaic, reflecting  parallel development  in Eastern and Western varieties; and (3) verbs unique to Modern Western Aramaic (MWA), including ‘boil’, ‘dry’, and ‘wake up’. In other Middle and Modern Aramaic languages the meanings from the third group are expressed by causatively marked pairs, so the lability of these verbs in MWA represents a  morphological innovation .
I will also propose some explanations for the lability drift in Neo-Aramaic languages of different branches, such as the phonetic loss of the anticausative marker, the expansion of verbs with four root consonants that cannot be causativized, and possible areal factors. The study is still a work in progress, so I would like to discuss some future plans, including the research of corpus data from historical texts and modern corpora to trace the development of labile verbs in more detail.

References
Khan, Geoffrey. 2016.  The Neo-Aramaic dialect of the Assyrian Christians of Urmi. Vol. 3. Lexical Studies and Dictionary.  Leiden/Boston: Brill.