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Peshpeg: Difference between revisions
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Peshpeg was originally a nominative-accusative language. The language also had several noun classes that eventually collapsed into the present three-way declension system based on natural gender, animacy, and countability and concreteness. Today, the language has developed into a split ergative system, based on the animacy hierarchy of the noun class system. Nominative-accusative marking appears in first second pronominal forms, and Class I pronominal forms. These pronominal forms lie on the upper end of the animacy hierarchy, while all other forms are considered low animacy forms. Class II nouns were originally indeclinable and fell lower on the animacy scale, although they displayed some level of agency and thus took different affixes to denote their noun class. As Minhast expanded into Peshpeg-speaking lands, agent marking developed in these lower animacy nouns through the incorporation of the Minhast ergative marker ''=de'', realized in Peshpeg Class II nouns as the submorpheme ''-d-''. Agency for low animacy nouns is considered a marked condition, hence this explains the use of ergative morphology to indicate the marked condition. The unmarked form was reinterpreted as the absolutive case. | Peshpeg was originally a nominative-accusative language. The language also had several noun classes that eventually collapsed into the present three-way declension system based on natural gender, animacy, and countability and concreteness. Today, the language has developed into a split ergative system, based on the animacy hierarchy of the noun class system. Nominative-accusative marking appears in first second pronominal forms, and Class I pronominal forms. These pronominal forms lie on the upper end of the animacy hierarchy, while all other forms are considered low animacy forms. Class II nouns were originally indeclinable and fell lower on the animacy scale, although they displayed some level of agency and thus took different affixes to denote their noun class. As Minhast expanded into Peshpeg-speaking lands, agent marking developed in these lower animacy nouns through the incorporation of the Minhast ergative marker ''=de'', realized in Peshpeg Class II nouns as the submorpheme ''-d-''. Agency for low animacy nouns is considered a marked condition, hence this explains the use of ergative morphology to indicate the marked condition. The unmarked form was reinterpreted as the absolutive case. | ||
As for the Class III nouns, they remained unmarked for both case and number. This is unsurprising as these nouns are inherently uncountable, and statistically speaking, their role as agents is an uncommon, if not rare occurrence. The nominative-accusative marking of Class I nouns and the ergative marking of Class II nouns are sufficient to disambiguate the semantic role a Class III noun when it is a core argument. Ambiguity arises when two Class III nouns occupy both agent and patient roles in a transitive clause. In those cases, it is usually assumed that if one of the nouns was mentioned in discourse before the other, that noun functions as the agent. This indicates that in clause chains, Peshpeg employs an S/A pivot, in contrast to Minhast's robust S/O pivot | As for the Class III nouns, they remained unmarked for both case and number. This is unsurprising as these nouns are inherently uncountable, and statistically speaking, their role as agents is an uncommon, if not rare occurrence. The nominative-accusative marking of Class I nouns and the ergative marking of Class II nouns are sufficient to disambiguate the semantic role a Class III noun when it is a core argument. Ambiguity arises when two Class III nouns occupy both agent and patient roles in a transitive clause. In those cases, it is usually assumed that if one of the nouns was mentioned in discourse before the other, that noun functions as the agent. This indicates that in clause chains, Peshpeg employs an S/A pivot, in contrast to Minhast's robust S/O pivot which demonstrates the ergative nature underlying the syntactic level as well. | ||
===Nouns=== | ===Nouns=== | ||