Grammatical relations in Hinuq

Abstract

Nakh-Daghestanian languages are usually described has being (morphologically) ergative. Agents in transitive clauses are marked with the ergative case whereas subjects of intransitive clauses and objects of transitive clauses get the absolutive. In addition, in many Nakh-Daghestanian languages verbal and sometimes adverbial affixes agree in gender and number with the absolutive-marked argument of the clause (i.e. S or O). However, a closer look at the grammatical roles reveals many instance of neutral or accusative alignment. For example, a number of NakhDaghestanian languages do not distinguish absolutive and ergative for some or all SAP pronouns. In my talk I want to take a closer look at grammatical relations in Hinuq, the smallest of the Tsezic languages (Nakh-Daghestanian). I will follow the approach by Bickel (to appear), who defines grammatical relations as “equivalence sets of arguments treated the same way by some construction”. I will look not only at the case marking and agreement patterns of various predicate and clause types, but also at behavioral properties such as reflexivization, relativization, complement constructions and coordination.

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