Saturday, August 13, 2016

Detail #304: Quirky Case (in)direct Objects

The study of quirky case mainly seems to have focused on subjects and direct objects. However, one could imagine some quirks of quirky case extending onto indirect objects as well.

Quirky case is a phenomenon in morphosyntax whereby the expected case marking for a subject or object is systematically deviated from with certain verbs. Examples include the genitive subjects of Finnish täytyy, on pakko, and a bunch of other auxiliaries and some constructions. Another example is the German verb hilfen, whose direct object is in the dative. Icelandic vanta takes an accusative subject (as well as object). Non-morphological subjecthood tests can demonstrate in some languages that these are true subjects (or objects), while in other languages they are less so. (IIRC, for instance, Russian quirky subjects are not true subjects.)

Some languages draw the line between direct object and indirect object differently from what we might consider the "standard alignment" - some languages conflate "monotransitive object" with "ditransitive indirect object", and mark "ditransitive direct object" differently - so called dechticaetiative or secundative languages.
Let's call the monotransitive/indirect object-case the accusative, and the ditransitive direct object the dechticaetiative case. Here, we get two spots to put quirkiness, and both options are somewhat compelling:
If the same verb permits both monotransitive and ditransitive use, we find an interesting alteration as to which referent is marked quirkily if the accusative is marked - somehow this feels as though it should be against some universal. The other option is the dechticaetiative, which sounds like a more reasonable NP to be quirky, even though the alteration we now get is whether the DO is quirkily marked or not.

Unlike direct objects and subjects, I've never encountered a list of cross-linguistic syntactical and semantic properties of indirect objects, or maybe cross-linguistic typologies of them, thus I really have no idea what one would expect from a quirky case i.o. (or a quirky case argument in a dectichaetiative system), that would distinguish them from some more oblique argument.

2 comments:

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  2. In my conlang, Uscaniv, indirect objects can be dative or separative depending on the direction implied. Any privative verb, such as cat 'to take' will have a separative indirect object: catce nis al |take-3S.PRT 1S-SEP 3S-ACC| 'he took it from me', lit. he took me it. As the separative doubles as a malefactive, when adding a malefactive constituent, it'll look a lot like an indirect object: caśce nis al 'he destroyed my thing'. But this is fairly predictable and I'm sure it happens in a lot of languages.

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