I posted, a good while ago, a post that described the "anti-ergative" subsystem of Finnish. The post also contains an extension of this into ditransitive verbs. However, the pegative alignment that I've previously described did not enter into that post.
What would an analogous anti-pegative alignment look like, especially in a language that in the "normal" case is pegative?
Let us consider the situation when the subject is omitted:
[omitted subject] gives thing.acc person.nom
This
seems like a fairly natural way of dealing with the situation - there
is no case problems whatsoever. We may want to make the situation worse
before we come up with something interesting. So, first we reduce the
case marking a bit:
Subjects, objects and recipients are all marked by nominative, except ditransitive subjects, which are marked with the pegative.
Given
the nature of, say, dechticaetiative languages, this seems like the
most probable situation for a pegative alignment in a real language.
The situations we're interested in are, schematically, something like these:
- [omitted subject] gives thing.nom person.nom
- person.[nom? peg?] gives [omitted thing.nom] person.nom
- person.[nom? peg?] gives thing.nom [omitted recipient]
If we extend this to a Finnic-like thing, this also would include situations where the subject is not canonically marked, although not strictly speaking omitted. We can extend this even further: non-canonical objects and non-canonical recipients.
1. Omitted or non-canonical subject
It seems this situation shouldn't call for any specific thing to happen in an anti-pegative system. Maybe, just maybe, we could have the pegative marker ascend to either the direct or the indirect object. Both possibilities seem reasonable, depending on what the speakers see as the semantics of the case marker: does it a) mark the argument with the most agency or b) the argument that provides for the recipient. To put it in very clunky English rephrasings:
a) Erin gave, and Wendy received candy.Both of these seem somewhat compelling (albeit probably typologically speaking very improbable). Let's present some graphs:
Wendy has some agency, Erin has more agency, candy has none, thus omitting Erin, Wendy is now at the top of the agency scale.
b) From Erin, Wendy was given candy.
Wendy has agency, Erin is marked as origin. Let's use an even less natural preposition here:
Of Erin, Wendy was given candy.
Wendy was given of candy.
The standard bit of the pegative system:
SUBJ DO IO nom ------- ------- nom nom ------- nom ------- nom peg nom nom
Possibility 1 extends the table with these rows:
SUBJ DO IO ------- nom ------- ------- ------- nom ------- peg nom
Possibility 2 does this instead:
SUBJ DO IO ------- nom ------- ------- ------- nom ------- nom peg
We also have possibilities 1b and 2b, where we get the following tables:
Possibility 1b:
SUBJ DO IO ------- peg ------- ------- ------- nom ------- peg nom
Possibility 2b:
SUBJ DO IO ------- nom ------- ------- ------- peg ------- nom peg
Both of these seem pretty unlikely. If we want to see some really twisted stuff we could come up with worse varieties still, though:
SUBJ DO IO nom ------- ------- nom nom ------- nom ------- nom peg nom nom ------- peg nom ------- ------- peg ------- nom -------
Or alternatively
SUBJ DO IO nom ------- ------- nom nom ------- nom ------- nom peg nom nom ------- nom peg ------- ------- nom ------- peg -------
Both of these should be pretty bad options - especially due to the three last rows probably making it impossible for someone learning their first language to draw a reasonable conclusion about the distribution of the case marker, along the way that the anti-accusative system given last in my post on anti-ergative systems.
We could of course develop the details for an anti-pegative appearing in an otherwise decthicaetiative or "normal" alignment also. Such a follow-up post will probably appear in a few days.
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