Fritz Serzisko (Köln):
Case Marking and Pronouns in Ik (Nilo-Saharan)

Donnerstag, 9.30 Uhr

The case marking pattern in Ik is different depending on personal inflection on the verb and predication status.

In main predications the following pattern holds:


1st, 2nd person and impersonal: V-PronominalActor NUndergoer-Nominativ
3rd person V NUndergoer-Accusativ
Lexical Actors V NActor-Nominativ NUndergoer-Accusativ (= VSO)

In secondary predications:

for all persons V-PronominalActor NUndergoer-Accusativ
Lexical Actors NActor-Accusativ V NUndergoer-Accusativ (= SVO)
The following facts are important for a fuller understanding of case marking in IK:

1. Person marking

  1. Person may be expressed by independent (emphatic?) pronouns, in the text corpus are these extremely rare.
  2. The presented patterns seem to be independent of number. This indicates a different morphosyntactic status of person and number marking on the verb. There is further evidence for that.
  3. 3rd person is formally zero. Question: Is 3rd person marked by zero or is 3rd person not expressed at all?

2. Case marking

  1. 5 cases are formally distinguished: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Ablative and Genitive.
  2. Both Nominative and Accusative can be used with Actor and Undergoer, independent of transitivity.
  3. Both cases are morphologically marked. The unmarked = base form of the noun is used if no role is assigned as in compound nouns and in certain other constructions

3. Main vs. Secondary predications

  1. By secondary predications are meant all formally marked (by the so-called subjunctive) predications and relative clauses.
  2. Word order is VSO in main and SVO in secondary predications.
  3. VSO with a lexical subject is extremely rare in the corpus. This corresponds to the PAS constraint.

  4. and it furthermore is pragmatically marked in that there is usually no topic-comment distinction. VSO-predications are either ALL-NEW utterances (thetic) or ALL-OLD utterances.

In other words: morphological, syntactic and pragmatic factors have to be considered to acchieve a satisfactory description.

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