Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 30, Issue 4, 2006

Africa is a continent where grammaticalized case systems are a rare phenomenon. But there is one exception: East Africa is a region where there is a relatively high occurrence of case languages (that is, languages with a grammaticalized case system). With regard to the type of case systems which occur in Africa, again, the picture is crosslinguistically unbalanced as there are hardly any ergative languages. In other words, of the two most common case types worldwide, accusative and ergative(/absolutive), essentially only one is represented in Africa, namely the accusative type. From a worldwide perspective, Africa seems to be a continent where case has nothing special to offer. However, in East Africa there are so called marked-nominative languages which seem to be quite unique worldwide. They are somehow a mixture: On the one hand they share features with prototypical accusative languages, on the other hand they share features with prototypical ergative languages. In the present paper I will, first, define the typical features of a marked-nominative language. Second, I will give an overview of the languages which have a marked-nominative system. Third, I will deal with the question of whether the distribution of marked-nominative languages is genetically or areally motivated. And fourth, I will speculate on how such unusual systems could have developed.

Biblical Hebrew has three specific verb forms for performing directive speech-acts such as commands and requests. Hebraists (e.g., Bendavid 1967) observe that two other forms are also used for this purpose, in addition to other uses. In Hatav (1997), I show that those two forms are general modals, which may be used for any kind of modality, including directives.  Complying with Grice’s (1975) cooperative rule, I argue in this paper, a biblical character would prefer the specific forms to perform directives. However, I show that the specific forms are deictic in nature, and can be used only when the speech-time functions as the reference-time of the utterance. In case of another reference-time, the speaker must resort to the general modals.

Modern Hebrew (MH) is undergoing a change in its morphological structure. Unlike earlier periods of the language, in which all nominal suffixation processes resulted in stress shift to the suffix, MH has a few suffixes that exhibit variable behavior. When attached to canonical bases, they pattern with other suffixes in that they attract stress and may cause phonological changes to the base. When attached to non-canonical bases, they do not attract stress and cause no phonological changes to the base. Additionally, stress neutral suffixation is much more regular and productive than stress attracting suffixation in its morphology, distribution and semantics. I argue that these two different patterns can be accounted for in terms of morphological levels within the theoretical framework of Stratal Optimality Theory (Kiparsky 2000, 2002, to appear). The different phonological behavior is accounted for in terms of different ranking of two constraints, applying at stem level vs. word level. The morphological and semantic correlates are attributed to the different properties of stem vs. word-level morphology. The diachronic change, namely the activation of word level for nominal suffixation, triggered further changes in MH’s morphological system: the development of several default suffixes, and the emergence of two distinct subgrammars, which differ from each other in gender assignment and the correlation between gender and inflectional class (in the sense of Aronoff 1994).