Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Detail #44: Migratory case suffixes

(This feature could arguably be used as evidence that the cases in question are not cases, but rather some kind of adpositional clitics).

In a language with some verbs triggering quirky case on the object, under certain circumstances if the object is missing the case suffix/clitic goes somewhere else in the sentence. The circumstances that trigger this are:

  • objects being topicalized
  • objects only being present as congruence marking on the noun
  • objects having certain determiners on them that prevent the case markers
In these cases, the case marker tends to appear on whichever is the rightmost of:
  • adjectival complements (esp. object complements)
  • indirect objects
  • subjects
  • a dummy pronoun

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