Optional Ergative Case-Marking in Ṭuroyo

Ergative Case Marking and Agreement in ‍the Central Dialect of Talishi Mahinnaz Mirdehghan Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, I.R.Iran Genia Nourian M.A. in Linguistics, Shahid Beheshti University, I.R.Iran Abstract The present research accounts for the characteristic patterns of ergativity within the central dialect of Talishi language as one of the most important modern endangered North-Western Iranian languages. Talishi includes three main dialects as follows: Northern, Central and Southern dialects, which are divided according to the geographical area of their usage. The only dialect in which ergativity is preserved is the central one. Due to the crucial role of case and case marking studies in linguistic analyses, the present research is focused on the central dialect to be able to present a scientific analysis of the ergative data within the domain of active simple and compound transitive sentences. The analysis also demonstrates the agreement patterns in transitive and intransitive verbs, as well as the realization of case marking in the system under investigation according to Dixon’s criteria. Keywords: Central Taleshi, Ergativity, Case Marking, Core NPs, Agreement

International Journal of American Linguistics, 2011

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a nearly extinct Kawapanan language from Peruvian Amazonia. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it investigates the obligatory crossreferencing of arguments in the complex Shiwilu verb. This system is predominantly nominative-accusative, with the caveat that main clause object markers coincide with those conveying subject in one type of clause involving nominal predicates, as well as subject and object of dependent clauses. Second, this article provides a first analysis of the enclitic =ler, which may attach to transitive subjects and thus exhibits an ergative-like distribution. Unlike the situation in languages with syntacticized ergative systems, omission of =ler does not yield ungrammatical utterances; however, transitive clauses displaying a =ler-marked subject NP are not unusual either. It is argued that =ler has discriminatory and discourse-pragmatic functions, and is comparable to instances of "optional" or pragmatic marking of the ergative/agentive in other languages.

2014

The origin of the research idea of this thesis comes from a feature discovered through fieldwork on Bugis, a Western Malayo-Polynesian language. In this language, two different word orders are possible: in the basic order, different affixes occur on the verb and the arguments, while the non basic order receives no marking. The goal of this thesis is to examine some unrelated languages in order to find out if, with different word orders, there is any difference in marking. Seven languages belonging to different families and areas have been chosen for this purpose: Tuvan (South Siberian Turkic), Lao (Tai, Tai-Kadai), Figuig Berber (Berber, Afroasiatic), Itonama (Amazonian isolate), Savosavo (Papuan), Madurese (Western Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian) and Santali (Munda, Austroasiatic). The obtained results indicate that most languages show some different marking with different word orders, and a few languages that do not, have a rigid word order that does not allow changes. The changes in marking are not as obvious as in Bugis except in Madurese, which shows a high interaction between marking and word order. Moreover, the fact that clauses with the basic word order receive more marking occurs also in Figuig Berber. Further research with many more languages would be needed in order to discover if this feature may be common cross linguistically, given that the low number of the studied languages does not allow cross linguistic generalisations.

International Journal of American Linguistics, 2011

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a nearly extinct Kawapanan language from Peruvian Amazonia. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it investigates the obligatory crossreferencing of arguments in the complex Shiwilu verb. This system is predominantly nominative-accusative, with the caveat that main clause object markers coincide with those conveying subject in one type of clause involving nominal predicates, as well as subject and object of dependent clauses.

Korean Journal of Linguistics, 2023

This paper examines how the true identity of seeming case markers can be revealed. The particles-i/ka and-ul/lul in Korean, generally analyzed as nominative and accusative case markers, respectively, also occur in nonargument positions. Most previous analyses have assumed that they are ambiguous between case and non-case markers and/or that they have different meanings (when used as non-case markers). However, previous analyses have not successfully established objective criteria to distinguish between case and non-case markers and define different meanings. Although some analyses argue that the particles are not case markers, they have failed to justify the fact that only-i/ka can occur after the subject and only-ul/lul after the object. Considering the inaccuracy of these two assumptions, we provide a unified analysis: as context-dependent lexical variants, they are delimiters of the same meaning. Regarding their distribution,-i/ka can occur only in a stative context and-ul/lul only in a dynamic context. We demonstrate that-i/ka has (wrongly) been analyzed as a nominative marker because the subject is always in a stative context and-ul/lul, as an accusative marker because the object is always in a dynamic context.

John Benjamins, 2018

This paper reconstructs the history of a set of innovated 1st and 2nd person verbal prefixes in Reyesano which manifest the phenomenon of 'hierarchical agreement' in transitive clauses, according to a 2>1>3 hierarchy. I argue that these prefixes come from independent ergative-absolutive pronouns which first became case-neutral enclitics in 2nd position in main clauses and then verb prefixes. And I show that the hierarchical effects that the prefixes manifest in synchrony have nothing to do with the working of a hierarchy during the grammaticalization process. In doing so, the paper contributes to the growing body of diachronic evidence against the idea that the person hierarchy is a universal of human language reflecting a more general principal of human cognition.

2014

This paper investigates the transitive uses of the verb fan "annoy; be annoyed; bother to do", which exhibit both similarities and disparities between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, as far as the data from Gigaword corpus, containing data from Mainland China (XIN) and Taiwan (CNA), are concerned. In terms of similarities, the causative (and agentive) use(s) of the transitive fan is/are shared by both Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. The disparity mainly lies in the mental use of fan "be annoyed", which is not only unattested in the corpus of Taiwan Mandarin but also reported as weird by our informants. This mental use, on the other hand, is well attested in the corpus. In order to describe as well as explain the difference in uses between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, we adopt the Theta System Theory (Reinhart 2002; Marelj 2004) to probe into the argument structures of the transitive verb fan and further pinpoint the fundamental syntactic diff...

Proceedings of Social Sciences, Humanities and Economics Conference (SoSHEC 2017), 2018

Discussing Japanese, English, and Indonesian is interesting because of its prominent differences. Among the most noticeable issues is the case-marking for different constituencies. In respect to predicate filled by the verb, the verbal phrase becomes the mother's constituent in the sentence. The complement of the mother's constituents is the "child" constituent. If the predicate is the mother, then consequently the subject, object, and description are all the child's constituents. This paper aims to discuss how a constituent can be a child constituent in the three languages. Paper also aims to explore how to mark case on constituents that is triggered by verbal predicate in the languages in question. Applying the library research, the gained data from documentation are described and analyzed. The results show that the child constituents born by the verb when (1) the subject's constituents are on the intransitive verb, (2) the subject's constituents and the object's constituents are on the monotransitive or bitransitive verbs. The interesting findings are on the works of case-marking in these languages: Japanese is postposition to nouns; English experiences internal change of nouns; whereas Indonesian is not marked noun. In conclusion, understanding characteristics of language system for every language, it is useful for assisting learners to master languages in question.

Multiple-case marking, or case stacking, where words have more than one case suffix, is a well-documented phenomenon in the languages of Australia. There are many different functions this can have. It can be used to signify a time correlation between two clauses, eg. two events are happening simultaneously. It can also be used to indicate that one participant of one clause is also participating in another. Case stacking can also be used simply as a marker of grammatical tense. The Tangkic languages of north west Queensland feature these curious grammatical constructions. One language, Yukulta, is said to be the most conservative language of the family, meaning that it preserves features that are most similar to the ancestor language, or proto-language. Lardil, another Tangkic language, has some innovative grammatical features that it does not share with Yukulta but are related to features found in Yukulta. My project is a comparison of Yukulta and Lardil and how each of their case marking systems indicates the function of the clause. The aim is to thoroughly compare most, if not all the different ways Yukulta and Lardil use this multiple-case marking feature in order to signify the function of the clause being marked. As of yet, there has been no comprehensive comparative survey of the morphological formatives in the Tangkic languages and this project contributes significantly to that effort. This project also provides comprehensive evidence needed to make inferences about how the proto-Tangkic language indicated clause function with case marking.