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Language structures throughout the world

How to talk about role coding: cases

and index-sets, nominative/accusative,
subject/object, agent/patient
Posted on 2012/05/08 by Martin Haspelmath

As an Athabaskanist working in Russia, Andrej Kibrik has long been interested in the
head-marking/dependent-marking typology: Athapaskan languages mark the major clause
roles by person prefixes on the verb, whereas the languages of Russia (Uralic, Turkic,
Nakh-Daghestanian, etc.) almost all show extensive case-marking and limited person-
indexing. In Kibrik (2012) (a paper that was originally presented at the LENCA conference
in Kazan), he now urges linguists working on head-marking languages to draw the
consequences from the parallelism between head and dependent marking and to use
terminology familiar from case systems, i.e. “nominative/accusative” and
“ergative/absolutive”, rather than “subject/object” or “agent/patient”.

Thus, the example in (1) is OK, but the examples in (2) and (3) are not good.

(1) Navajo (p. 220)

Ø-ni-sh-teeh
3.ACC-IMPF-1sg.NOM-handle
‘I carry him.’

(2) Lavukaleve (Terrill 2003: 227)

Aira la ali na a-o-le.
woman(F) art.F man(M) art.M 3SG.M.OBJ-3SG.F.SUBJ-see
‘The woman saw the man.’

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(3) Lakota (Pustet & Rood 2008: 336)

na-má-ya-h’ų-pi
stem-1SG.PAT-2.AGT-hear-PL.AGT
‘You guys hear me.’

I think that Kibrik is right that case-labels as in (1) would be entirely appropriate for distinct
person indexes (see Haspelmath 2009: 510). But what exactly is the difference between
case labels like “nominative/accusative” and argument-class (“grammatical-relation”) labels
like “subject/object”? According to Kibrik (p. 225), “grammatical relations” are notions that
“serve to capture the behavioral properties of arguments”, whereas case labels are more
appropriate for role coding. He says that it would be “odd to suggest that Latin case
desinences mark grammatical relations” (rather than semantic roles), and that nobody
would talk about the “Latin subject case” or the “Latin object case”. But here I am not so
sure. The “subject” notion in particular correlates very highly with the nominative case, more
so than the “agent” notion does. Latin cases first point hearers to broad argument-classes,
and only in a next step can they infer the roles (also on the basis of the verb meaning). So
saying that “subject” and “object” are relevant only for behavioural properties is not quite
right.

I find the generalized notion of role alignment (e.g. Bickel 2011) highly useful: The extremely
diverse roles of verbs are grouped into a small number of broad classes not only by coding
elements such as cases and person-indexes, but also by behavioural processes. So we
can talk about accusative alignment of case-marking, but also about accusative alignment
of relativization, and both give us reasons to talk about argument-classes (or “evidence for
grammatical relations”). Subject and object are just two other traditional labels for the
argument-classes {S, A} and {P}, much like nominative and accusative. Thus, I do not think
that it really matters which labels one uses. Kibrik emphasizes that grammatical relations
are language-specific, but of course so are the argument-classes as evidenced by coding
elements (cases and person-indexes). Personally I would prefer the case-derived labels,
because such labels exist not only for S/A vs. P alignment (accusative alignment), but also
for S/P vs. A alignment (ergative alignment), and also because the terms sound more
technical and precise. But this is also a matter of taste.

The reason why people often use “subject/object” for person-indexes is of course that
“nominative/accusative” are far better known as case-labels than as generalized alignment
labels, and informally they have long been used as equivalents of “agent/patient”.

But the main reason why I don’t think we can legislate a particular terminology is that the
argument-classes are quite different across languages, and even though similar terms for
similar phenomena are transparent, they should not mislead us to think that the phenomena
are identical. We can call the Japanese case-markers -ga and -o “nominative” and
“accusative”, but in Japanese double-nominative constructions they do not behave as
expected. Such idiosyncrasies are normal, and they remind us that the Japanese
Nominative is not the same case as the Russian Nominative.

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The most surprising aspect of Kibrik’s paper for me was that he chose Navajo to illustrate
nominative/accusative person indexing, because in Navajo, the actual shapes of the two
kinds of person forms are mostly not different – they differ in position. This is similar to
Bantu languages (e.g. ex. (4)), and quite different from, say, Arabic.

(4) Swahili
a. tu-li-wa-ona
1PL-PST-3PL-see
‘we saw them’
b. wa-li-tu-ona
3PL-PST-1PL-see
‘they saw us’

(5) Arabic
a. ra’ay-ta-haa
see.PRF-2SG.NOM-3SG.F.ACC
‘you saw her’
b. ra’a-t-ka
see.PRF-3SG.F.NOM-2SG.ACC
‘she saw you’

Where the nominative indexes are clearly different from the accusative indexes (as in
Arabic), I think using the case labels is very intuitive, but in the case of Navajo and Swahili, it
is less so. After all, we would not normally speak about “nominative” and “accusative”
word-order marking in languages like Mandarin.

In a recent paper (Haspelmath 2012+), I have proposed the term “index-set” for a paradigm
of person forms that differ in their shape. So Arabic can be said to have a nominative
index-set and an accusative index-set, but Navajo has only a single index-set. Since the
S-indexes are in the same positional slots as the A-indexes, we can still say that there is
nominative/accusative alignment of indexing in Navajo, but only alignment of index order,
not alignment of index form.

References

Bickel, Balthasar. 2011. Grammatical relations typology. In Jae Jung Song (ed.). The Oxford
handbook of linguistic typology, 399-444. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2009. Terminology of Case. In Andrej Malchukov & Andrew Spencer
(eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Case, 505-517. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2012. Argument indexing: a conceptual framework for the syntax of
bound person forms. Ms., Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Kibrik, Andrej A. 2012. What’s in the head of head-marking languages? In Pirkko

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Suihkonen, Bernard Comrie, & Valery Solovyev (eds.). Argument structure and grammatical
relations: a cross-linguistic typology, 211-240. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Pustet, Regina & David S. Rood. 2008. Argument dereferentialization in Lakota. In Mark
Donohue & Søren Wichmann (eds.). The typology of semantic alignment, 334-356. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Terrill, Angela. 2003. A Grammar of Lavukaleve. (Mouton Grammar Library). Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.

MAR TIN HASPEL MATH

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