Allein auf weiter Flur? Die indogermanische Pronominalflexion im typologischen Vergleich

The article gives an outline of the inflectional peculiarities of Proto-Indo-European and its daughter languages, comparing it with unrelated languages, which show hardly any parallels to its pronominal inflection. The latter, constituting a functionally unmotivated divergence from the nominal paradigms, is presented as a probably recent development, which on the other side later leads to a levelling of nominal and pronominal endings in many Indo-European languages, although in some of them inflectional differences may persist until the present day. It is argued that the fusional morphosyntax of Indo- European faciliates linguistic changes of that kind.