Ex- a Weird Old Word Order -ploring

Once, in my halcyon days of doctoral studies, I gave an informal presentation that ended not with the typical slide “any questions?”, but rather “any answers?”. The talk’s topic fitted into my overall research into the word order of ancient Indo-European languages. My task was to acquire, present, evaluate and compare the available evidence, upon which I could then conclude with new findings or insights. So, my audience of Edinburgh experts might have been expecting a presentation concerned with what their junior colleague had come to understand. What they got instead was well-researched frustration about something that I didn’t understand – and still don’t. So, forgive the reminiscences and selfish return to gone glory days; I have unfinished business with a curious piece of ancient syntax. It saw words dissected and spread around their sentences, its motives unclear. In what follows, I’ll set out what it looks like in our historical texts, before turning to how it theoretically got…