The Marked Nominative in Dhaashatee - the Language of the Burji in Southern Ethiopia

The Highland East Cushitic language Dhaashatee (often referred to as “Burji”) has two ways of marking the nominative on common nouns: (1) the “long nominative”, marked by the suffixes -ku (m) and -shi (f), and (2) the “short nominative”, marked by the suffix -i (m) or vowel shortening (f). In past publications, the usage of the two forms has been linked to definiteness. However, different authors do not agree as to which nominative is definite and which one is indefinite. The goal of the present study was to shed more light on the conditions that determine the choice of one or the other nominative in stories. For the bulk of the data, previous hypotheses have been confirmed according to which modified subjects are marked by the short nominative, while unmodified ones are marked by the long one. Yet, the choice of the nominative is not only based on syntactic principles, but also on discourse-related ones – i.e. whether a participant is newly introduced or re-appears. Thus, an...Show moreThe Highland East Cushitic language Dhaashatee (often referred to as “Burji”) has two ways of marking the nominative on common nouns: (1) the “long nominative”, marked by the suffixes -ku (m) and -shi (f), and (2) the “short nominative”, marked by the suffix -i (m) or vowel shortening (f). In past publications, the usage of the two forms has been linked to definiteness. However, different authors do not agree as to which nominative is definite and which one is indefinite. The goal of the present study was to shed more light on the conditions that determine the choice of one or the other nominative in stories. For the bulk of the data, previous hypotheses have been confirmed according to which modified subjects are marked by the short nominative, while unmodified ones are marked by the long one. Yet, the choice of the nominative is not only based on syntactic principles, but also on discourse-related ones – i.e. whether a participant is newly introduced or re-appears. Thus, an unmodified subject may be marked by the short nominative if the referent has appeared in the story before, while a modified subject may be marked by the long nominative if it appears for the first time. What requires further research is the question under which conditions the discourse-related principle may override the syntactic one.Show less

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The Marked Nominative in Dhaashatee - the Language of the Burji in Southern Ethiopia