polarity-based DAM

[Matti Miestamo]

Dear Peter,

Yimas shows a range of differences in verbal person marking between 
affirmatives and negatives. A part of this system is an asymmetry 
between affirmatives and negatives whereby the 1st and 2nd persons show 
accusative alignment in negatives instead of the tripartite system found 
in affirmatives. For details, see Foley's 1991 grammar (and cf. also pp. 
146-149 in my 2005 book Standard negation: The negation of declarative 
verbal main clauses in a typological perspective (Mouton de Gruyter)). I 
can't think of any other potentially interesting examples in my sample 
of ca. 300 languages.

Best wishes,
Matti

--
Matti Miestamo
<http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~matmies/>


peterarkadiev wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> is anyone aware of clear cases of differential agent marking
> conditioned by negation (or involving negation as one of possible
> conditioning factors)? What I am looking for is not the famous
> Russian-type Genitive of negation but rather something similar to
> well-known TAM-based ergativity splits. An ideal example would be a
> language where Ergative case marking is limited to positive polarity
> environments and is suspended in the scope of negation.
> 
> Thanks a lot in advance!
> 
> Yours sincerely,
> 
> Peter Arkadiev Institute of Slavic Studies Moscow
>