This article proposes an analysis of “allocutive” morphemes in Basque, which are taken to be a species of vocative expression. This article focuses on two properties of vocative clitics: the fact that their morpheme order inside the auxiliary is sensitive to ergative person; and the way vocative clitics condition exponence of auxiliary roots. These reflect the first-merged position of vocative ...

1 INTRODUCTION. If inflectional morphology were perfectly straightforward, a listing of the inflected forms of a word for a given language would at the same time give us a list of the morphosyntactic values relevant for that language. For example in Yir-Yoront (1), a Pama-Nyungan language from the Cape York Peninsula, Australia, the distinct forms displayed by such words as 'foot' or 'leg' just...

In ergative constructions, the agent of a transitive verb is in the ergative case and the theme is in the absolutive case. By contrast, in biabsolutive constructions, both the agent and theme of a transitive verb appear in the absolutive case. This paper presents and analyzes the biabsolutive construction in two Nakh-Dagestanian languages, Lak and Tsez. Despite many surface similarities, the bi...

In addition to the transitive and intransitive, ergative languages of the Polynesian group commonly have another type of construction, which is called middle. The middle construction stands somewhere in between the transitive and the intransitive. It involves two arguments, but crucially is syntactically intransitive. The subject appears in ABS, not ERG. The logical object appears in some obliq...

extended abstract 1. introduction nowadays kurdish language is often divided to 3 main groups: 1-the southern group consists of several incongrous accents that are spoken in the sout of iranian kurdistan. 2-the central group consists of iraqi northeastern kurdish, kurdistan of iran and the adjacent areas around it and called surani. 3-northern kurdi wich is the language of more than ⅔ of kurdis...