Marked nominative in Africa

Bibliographic Data

ID20381071
AuthorsChrista König (Frankfurt am Main, Germany, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume30
Issue4
Pages655-732
Publication date2006-09-20
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueStudies in Language (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0378-4177 • E-ISSN: 1569-9978
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/sl.30.4.02kon
OpenAlexW1987803412
LanguageEN
Citations received14

Africa is a continent where grammaticalized case systems are a rare phenomenon. But there is one exception: East Africa is a region where there is a relatively high occurrence of case languages (that is, languages with a grammaticalized case system). With regard to the type of case systems which occur in Africa, again, the picture is crosslinguistically unbalanced as there are hardly any ergative languages. In other words, of the two most common case types worldwide, accusative and ergative(/absolutive), essentially only one is represented in Africa, namely the accusative type. From a worldwide perspective, Africa seems to be a continent where case has nothing special to offer. However, in East Africa there are so called marked-nominative languages which seem to be quite unique worldwide. They are somehow a mixture: On the one hand they share features with prototypical accusative languages, on the other hand they share features with prototypical ergative languages. In the present paper I will, first, define the typical features of a marked-nominative language. Second, I will give an overview of the languages which have a marked-nominative system. Third, I will deal with the question of whether the distribution of marked-nominative languages is genetically or areally motivated. And fourth, I will speculate on how such unusual systems could have developed

Ergative case · Geography · Linguistics · Nominative case · Transitive relation · Verb · Computer Science · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Mathematics · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence

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