ALS 2010 Annual Conference Programme - Australian Linguistic ...
ALS 2010 Annual Conference Programme - Australian Linguistic ...
ALS 2010 Annual Conference Programme - Australian Linguistic ...
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
El-Hankari<br />
Abdel El-Hankari (University of Queensland)<br />
a.hankari@uq.edu.au<br />
The clitic system in Berber: solving the puzzle<br />
Keywords: Berber, clitics, roots, prepositions, verbs.<br />
The verbal system in Berber (Afroasiatic) is generally formed by combining a bound<br />
lexical root with tense. The language has also the clitic pronoun system which allows<br />
lexical arguments to be dropped freely while their contribution to the clause<br />
is recovered from the presence of these clitics as in (1):<br />
(1) a. Nunja<br />
Nunja<br />
th-sRa<br />
3F.SG.NOM-buy.PERF<br />
Nunja bought his mother shoes<br />
th-i-sira<br />
F-PL-shoe<br />
b. th-sRa-s-thnd<br />
3F.SG.NOM-buy.PERF-3SG.DAT-3F.PL.ACC<br />
She bought them for her<br />
i-<br />
DAT-<br />
yma-s<br />
mother-3SG.GEN<br />
In (1a) the sentence makes use of a ditransitive verb whose arguments are the<br />
subject, object and dative. An alternative way of producing the same sentence<br />
is by using clitics as substitutes for lexical NPs as in (1b). These clitics agree with<br />
nouns they license in person, gender, number and Case. While this agreement<br />
pattern is generally true for all verbs, the system is not as straightforward as the<br />
data in (1) suggest. Berber has another set of (what appears to be) verbal roots<br />
having the meaning of BE or HAVE but do not necessarily follow the agreement<br />
pattern outlined in (1). Consider the data in (2-4):<br />
(2) a-rgaz<br />
M.SG-man<br />
aqa-th<br />
be-3M.SG.ACC<br />
The man is in the river<br />
(3) th-xinshi-t<br />
F-bag-F<br />
ta<br />
DEM.F.SG<br />
g-<br />
INESS<br />
thagh-s<br />
have-3SG.DAT<br />
w-Rza<br />
CS-river<br />
th-i-nifi-n<br />
F-PL-pea-PL<br />
This bag has peas in it (there is peas in this bag)<br />
(4) Ra-khum<br />
have-2M.PL.DAT<br />
rfrus<br />
money<br />
You have a lot of money<br />
attas<br />
lots<br />
The three roots, unlike other ordinary verbs, vary in their selection: √ aqa selects<br />
object clitics as in (2) while √ thagh and √ Ra select dative clitics as in (3-4). This<br />
is somewhat odd in the sense that object and dative clitics license the lexical<br />
subject. Note that a similar behaviour was also observed in Murrinh-Patha (an<br />
<strong>Australian</strong> language) by Walsh (1996a) and Nordlinger (2009).
Change language