The relevance of B. Delbrück’s work on Indo-European syntax (a century after his death)

Delbrück’s work on Indo-European syntax, particularly his contribution to the analysis of Vedic syntax, is still a useful tool for those wanting to deal with the study of Old Indian and Indo-European comparative syntax. Indeed, it is methodologically comparable with the recent analyses of the left periphery of the sentence. In fact, the notions of basic order of the major constituents of the sentence and of marked order are already present in Delbrück’s 1878 work, together with formal considerations that relate the variation of the order of constituents to the interface between the syntax and information structure of the sentence.