Marked nominative alignment
This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2017) |
Linguistic typology |
---|
Morphological |
|
Morphosyntactic |
|
Word order |
Lexicon |
In
Distribution
Marked nominative languages are relatively rare. They are well-documented in only two regions of the world: in northern Africa, where they occur in many languages of the
In Yuman and many of the Cushitic languages, however, the nominative is not always marked for reasons that are not known. There may, therefore, be not a strict case system but a reflection of discourse patterns or other non-
As in many Nilotic languages, Datooga case is marked by tone. The absolutive case has the unpredictable tone of the citation form of the noun, but the nominative is marked by a characteristic tone that obliterates the lexical tone. The tone is high for words of three syllables or less; for words with four or more syllables, the ends of the word have high tone, with a low tone in the middle of the word.
In most African languages with a marked nominative, the nominative is used for subjects following the verb, the absolutive with the copula, with subjects in focus position before the verb, and in all other situations.
See also
Notes
- ^ Dixon 1994, pp. 63–67
- ^ König, Christa (2008). Case in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ^ König, Christa (2008). Case in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ISBN 9789027264572. Open-access preprint versionavailable.
- ISBN 9781316884461.
References
- Dixon, Robert M. W. (1994). Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hinton, Leanne (1984). Havasupai songs : a linguistic perspective
- Kießling, Roland (2007). "The 'marked nominative' in Datooga", Journal of African languages and linguistics, vol. 28, no2, pp. 149–191
- The World Atlas of Language Structures Online[1]