SANTALI
SUMMARY
Prominent possessor constructions in Santali resemble ethical datives in that the agreement morphology that indexes prominent internal possessors, may also be used to index referents such as beneficiaries and maleficiaries (amongst other roles) that are not necessarily arguments of the predicate. However, if ‘possessive’ agreement is present, and either of the core arguments (i.e. subject or object) have a possessor, then that possessor will be the controller (and not some other referent). Verbs that agree with possessors are always marked by a suffix -ta that indicates that verbal agreement has a possessor or non-core argument as its controller.
See also Chepang.
LANGUAGE PROFILE
EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF PIPS
- Syntactic evidence in support of the internal status of prominent possessors is limited, since agreement on the verb is often the only indicator of the presence of a possessor.
- Possession sometimes indicated by bound possessive pronouns which are inherently internal to the possessive phrase.
- When expressed by independent (rather than bound) pronominals, prominent possessors have adnominal genitive case-marking, indicating dependency within the noun phrase.
KEY SOURCES
Neukom, Lucas. 2000. Argument marking in Santali. Mon-Khmer Studies Journal 30: 95-113.
