Belyaev, Oleg: ``Verbal case'' in Ashti Dargwa
A few peripheral verbal forms in Ashti Dargwa (East Caucasian), which has hierarchical person agreement, use the markers -i- or -u- before the person agreement suffix. At first glance, these markers seem to indicate the grammatical function of the controller of person agreement: -i- is used when it is a transitive subject (ergative, A), while -u- is used when it is a transitive object or an intransitive subject (absolutive, S/P). The actual distribution, however, is more complex and cannot be easily described by a single rule: -i- is also used with subjects of unergative intransitives, reflexives, and, most puzzlingly, absolutive arguments of verbs with dative experiencer subjects. I show that this distribution cannot be described in terms of morphosyntactic features or GF configurations, and argue that, while an analysis in terms of argument structure is possible, a semantic analysis that connects the use of -i- and -u- with semantic role specifications of the arguments captures the data in the most straightforward manner. The analysis is formalized in Glue Semantics.
December 22, 2022 |
<