Dawit Tilahun visits the Linguistic Structures research area's seminar series with a lecture on the system that marks nouns in relation to other elements within a clause (or sentence) in Gede’o, a Highland East Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia. All interested are welcome!
Case system in Gede’o The present discussion concerns the system that marks nouns in relation to other elements within a clause (or sentence) in Gede’o, a Highland East Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia. An examination of case and morphsyntactic alignment of subject (of intransitive verb), agent (of a transitive verb) and patient (of transitive verb) in the language illustrates that the patient of a transitive verb is unmarked while there is a situation where the subject of an intransitive verb is marked the same way as the agent of a transitive verb (e.g. korbe-yy-i dag-g-e (ram-PL-NOM.M come-3SG.F-PFV) “The rams came.” Vs moɗalʧ-i mine moor-ø-e (thief-NOM.M house loot-3SG.M-PFV) “The thief looted the house.”). This makes the language a marked nominative system, and as in ergative-absolutive system the patient of a transitive verb is unmarked. However, pronouns are distinctly marked for nominative and accusative case; thus the language interestingly exhibits a double case system of both marked nominative and nominative-accusative. Other case forms include genitive, dative, locative, instrumental, ablative, and similative cases.
Dawit T (Email: dawitjtilahun@gmail.com)