Home › Languages › Hanis Coos
Hanis Coos
Glottocode: coos1249
Genalogical classification: Coosan
Original alignment pattern: Nominative
Source construction: (i) Transitive sentence with an instrumental NP and no overt third person agent: '(Agent) VERBed X with Y', as in (1) (ii) Passive sentences with first or second person patient and third person agent, 'I/you was VERBEed by him/her/them', as in (2)
Developmental mechanism: (i) An instrumental NP is reinterpreted as an agent, so that the instrumental marker becomes a marker for A arguments. (ii) As passive sentences are the only possible strategy to encode combination of first or second person patients and third person agents, the distinction between active and passive is blurred in these contexts, so that the agent becomes an A argument, and the marker used for it in the passive sentences becomes a marker for A arguments.
Resulting construction: Transitive sentence with overt ergative emarker, 'Y ERG VERBed Y', as in (3).
Type of change: Reinterpretation of argument structure
Alignment in the resulting construction: Ergative-Absolutive
Global alignment pattern following the change: NP-based split ergativity
Constraints on the distribution of the resulting alignment: Restricted to nouns
Grammatical domains: Case marking
Symmetry: Asymmetric
Type of data: Internal reconstruction
References: Mithun 2005
Examples
(1) Hanis Coos (Coosan; Mithun 2005:86)
| k'wɨn-t | x̣=mɨl:aqətš |
| shoot-TRANS | OBL=arrow |
‘(He) shot at him with an arrow.’
(2) Hanis Coos (Coosan; Mithun 2005:87)
| x̣=lau | kwanɫ | tə=n=tsx̣ewé-i:ɬ | tə=x̣ | hú:mɨs |
| OBL-that_one | seems-will | that=1SG=kill-PASS | that=OBL | woman |
‘I may be killed by that woman.’
(3) Hanis Coos (Coosan; Mithun 2005:84)
| x̣=yɨqántštextbarime:x̣ | mæ | hanƛ | eʔkwɨnai:ɫ |
| ERG=last | people | shal | they.see.thee |
'The last generation shall see you.'