Prodoclin

Lívia e Rafael apresentaram o seminário abaixo no âmbito dos seminários organizados por Nick Evans.

A cross-linguistic study of case and switch-reference in unrelated languages

Rafael Nonato and Livia Camargo

3:30pm - 5:00pm

21 Mar 2014

Seminar Room B (Arndt Room), HC Coombs Building (9), Fellows Road, ANU

The growing body of information on the world’s languages has revealed typological similarities among languages which can hardly be said to be historically or geographically related among themselves, corroborating the hypothesis that linguistic variation is limited. In this talk we illustrate this claim with two case studies where we compare Amerindian and Oceanic indigenous languages with respect to clause-combining and argument-marking phenomena.

In the first case study we look at Kĩsêdjê (Jê, Brazil) and some Austronesian and Trans New Guinean languages. In these languages, there is a mechanism to disambiguate sentences such as “He saw him and he ran away”. Morphology between the clauses indicates whether their subjects are identical or different in reference, a kind of morphology that has been labeled “switch-reference marking” by Jacobsen (1967). We will look at details of the construction across the language groups and identify similarities and parametrized differences among its instantiations.

In our second case study we look at Yawanawa (Pano, Brazil) and a number of Pama-Nyungan languages. These languages have in common the fact that their ergative case systems are split according to a person hierarchy. Authors such as Goddard (1982), Comrie (1991), and Legate (2008, 2012) have proposed that these languages have tripartite case systems in which ergative is assigned to subjects of transitive clauses, accusative to objects, and nominative to subjects of intransitive clauses. We will show that Yawanawa also has such a system and analyse similarities and contrasts among specific constructions.

References

Comrie, Bernard (1991). “Form and function in identifying cases”. In: The Economy of Inflection.

Ed. by F. Plank. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 41–56.

Goddard, Cliff (1982). “Case systems and case marking in Australian languages: A new interpre-

tation”. In: Australian Journal of Linguistics 2, pp. 167–196.

Jacobsen, William (1967). “Switch-Reference in Hokan-Coahuiltec”. In: Studies in Southwestern

Ethnolinguistics. Ed. by Dell H. Hymes and William E. Bittle. Mouton, The Hague.

Legate, Julie Anne (2008). “Morphological and abstract case”. In: Linguistic Inquiry 39.1.

— (2012). “Types of ergativity”. In: Lingua 122