Question about head-marked datives
Enrique L. Palancar
epalancar at HOTMAIL.COM
Tue Oct 23 04:50:47 UTC 2007
Dear Colleages,
Lately, I have been wondering about head-marked datives. Chickasaw (also
Choktaw) (Muskogean) has been described in Munro (1999) and Munro and Gordon
(1982) to have a special set of dative pronominal affixes on the verb. The
set appears to have emerged from the fusion of older object encoding
pronominal prefixes with the dative applicative. These head-marked datives
do in Chickasaw quite a lot of the same things that dative case does in
other languages; besides, it also marks external possessor as in many
European languages, and it also reminds one of the dative subjects in
Icelandic/Old Norse and Dravidian lgs.
Otomi (Otopamean; Otomanguean) is another family of Amerindian
languages that has head-marked datives. The feature has always struck me as
odd typologically, but it was never more than a gut-feeling. I wanted now to
pursue a better perspective on the subject in order to understand it a
little bit better, and I thought itd be good to send the following question
to the list:
Does anybody know of other languages with similar datives?
Needless to say, Spanish, along with other Romance lgs., could count as such
one language if one takes dative verbal clitics as part of verbal
inflection.
Thank you very much for your help and for your knowledge,
Enrique Palancar
-Munro, Pamela. 1999. Chickasaw Subjecthood, in Doris L. Payne and Immanuel
Barshi, External Possession, pp. 251-292. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
-Munro, Pamela and Lynn Gordon. 1982. Syntactic Relations in Western
Muskogean: A Typological Perspective. Language, 58:1, pp. 81-115.
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