19.3175, Qs: Ergative Languages with Case on Adjectives

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LINGUIST List: Vol-19-3175. Mon Oct 20 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.3175, Qs: Ergative Languages with Case on Adjectives

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1)
Date: 20-Oct-2008
From: Patrycja Jablonska < patrjabl at yahoo.com >
Subject: Ergative Languages with Case on Adjectives

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:42:08
From: Patrycja Jablonska [patrjabl at yahoo.com]
Subject: Ergative Languages with Case on Adjectives

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Dear all,

I am looking for ergative languages which would require morphological case
marking on adjectival elements like primary and secondary predicates,
floated quantifiers, semipredicates 'alone', indefinite pronouns, etc. The
relevant phenomenon is illustrated in 1 for Czech:

1. Marie naucila Honzu chodit domu strizlivy/strizliveho.
   Marie.NOM taught Honza.ACC go hom sober.NOM/sober.ACC
  Marie taught Honza to go home sober.

The secondary predicate 'sober' can either agree for case with its
'controller' Honza or display some other case (in Czech it is NOM).

I would be interested to see whether there are fully or split-ergative
languages that display a similar requirement. The relevant questions then are: 

(i) what kind of argument can control case agreement on the adjective
(subject, object, Ergative, Absolutive, Dative, etc.?)
(ii) what is the non-agreeing case on the adjective
(iii) in what contexts does the agreeing and the non-agreeing pattern occur.

Thank you in advance for all the data as well as bibliographical
information. I will post a summary.

Best regards,

Patrycja Jablonska 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics






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