The distribution of unmarked cases in Samoan
نویسندگان
چکیده
Legate (2008) proposes a class of ergative case marking systems, in which sole arguments of intransitives receive nominative case, transitive patients receive accusative case, and transitive agents receive ergative case. The system does not exhibit absolutive as a distinct case. The appearance of a single morphological case on both intransitive sole arguments and transitive patients is due to a morphological syncretism between the nominative and accusative morphological cases. I argue that the Polynesian language Samoan falls into this category of ergative languages, arguing that both nominative and accusative case in Samoan are realised by the absence of any phonologically overt case marking on full DPs, but that nominative and accusative pronouns are morphologically distinguished. The evidence for this comes from nominalised clauses, where the distribution of the morphologically null case (ordinarily taken to be absolutive case) follows a nominative-accusative like distribution: P may retain the morphologically null case under nominalisation, but S and A may not. I argue this pattern falls out from positing two distinct morphologically null abstract Cases, nominative and accusative, which are licensed by distinct mechanisms; only accusative case is licensed under nominalisation. I also demonstrate previous analyses of Polynesian ergativity within the generative tradition (e.g., Bittner and Hale 1996a; Massam 2001) predict the wrong results for these data. 1
منابع مشابه
The Impact of Primary Schools on the Differential Distribution of Samoan Adolescents' Competence with Honorific Language
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