Relationships Within The Clause: Name: Shafa Salsabila Z Veronica
Relationships Within The Clause: Name: Shafa Salsabila Z Veronica
Relationships Within The Clause: Name: Shafa Salsabila Z Veronica
clause
Name :
• Shafa Salsabila Z
• Veronica
6.1 INDICATING GRAMMATICAL
RELATIONS IN THE CLAUSE
In English, both subjects and objects have a fixed position.
But core NPs don’t have a fixed position in all languages. Core NPs in Latin
can appear quite easily in different positions; both sentences in (1) have the
same meaning, although the order of the NPs is different in (1a) and (1b):
(Irish)
(Northern Sotho)
The (masculine) head nouns Mann ‘man’ and Hund ‘dog’ in (16) and (17) don’t
undergo any morphological changes: they’re in their basic form. But we can tell
who gets bitten in (17) from the case marking shown on other elements in the
NPs, namely the determiners and the adjectives. For instance, der is the
nominative form.
6.3.3 Ergative/absolutive systems
The word for ‘father’ has the same case, absolutive, when it’s an S
(24a) and when it’s an O (24c). The word for ‘mother’ is an S in (24b),
and so again has absolutive case, but it’s an A (transitive subject) in
(24c), so here it has the ergative case. However, pronouns in Dyirbal
employ a different system, as you now have the opportunity to work out
for yourself.
6.3.5 Marked and unmarked forms
At this point we can discover why linguists often just use the
terms ‘ergative’ or ‘accusative’ to describe the two systems: it is
common for just this one member of each system to be the only NP
that is overtly case marked, whilst the other member of each system is
unmarked, i.e. has no special inflection for case at all. Instead we find
the ordinary root of the noun or pronoun (the form with no inflections).
In an ergative system, if one form lacks overt marking it will be
the absolutive NP, whilst the ergative NP has a special inflection.
In an accusative system, if one form lacks overt marking it will
be the nominative NP, whilst the accusative NP has a special
inflection.
AGREEMENT AND
CROSS-REFERENCING
1. What does verb agreement involve?
• Agreement, or cross-referencing, means that a
head verb is formally marked to reflect various
grammatical properties of its NP arguments.
• Cross-linguistically, the most common categories
involved in agreement are PERSON, NUMBER,
GENDER (= noun class) and CASE. We will see
that verb agreement can follow an accusative or
an ergative pattern even when there’s no actual
case marking on the NPs themselves.
There are, then, languages with no verb agreement
whatever, for example Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, Maori
and Malagasy.