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Home › Languages › Tākestāni

Tākestāni

Glottocode: take1255

Genalogical classification: Indo-European

Original alignment pattern: TAM-based split ergativity

Source construction: Past tense transitive constructions showing ergative alignment marked via (i) ergative case marking on A, (ii) verb agreement with S/P, (iii) clitic A markers. The construction is attested in a number of Tāti dialects, as in (1) and (2). Clitic markers are optional with overt A but obligatory when overt A is lacking, see (3). A-clitics are mobile and may select different hosts.

Developmental mechanism: In Takestāni, past transitive constructions undergo several changes: (i) ergative case marking of A is lost, (ii) verbal agreement with P is lost, (iii) A clitics become obligatory irrespective of the occurrence of overt A, but they become virtually exclusively cliticized to P, thus singling out P as locus of enclisis vs. A/S. Moreover, P may also show differential object marking, as opposed to S, as in (4) - (5), where definite P takes a distinct form of the demonstrative.

Resulting construction: Past tense transitive constructions show a tripartite alignment: S is the only argument that triggers agreement with the verb, P is the only argument that allows DOM and is the only possible host of A-clitics, A triggers the use of A-clitics. The pattern is shown in (4) - (5).

Type of change: Loss

Alignment in the resulting construction: Tripartite

Global alignment pattern following the change: Nominative-Accusative

Constraints on the distribution of the resulting alignment: The tripartite alignment is restricted to the past tense.

Grammatical domains: Verbal indexation, Case marking

Symmetry: Asymmetric

Type of data: Internal reconstruction

References: Rasekh-Mahand & Izadifar 2016

Comments:
Rasekhahand & Izdifar (2016) describe the alignment of past tense sentences in Tākestāni as nominative-accusative. While we do acknowledge the fact that S and P are now marked in different ways, it is clear that S does not yet fully behave as A, hence showing tripartite alignment. We agree with Rasekhahand & Izdifar (2016) that this may be an intermediate stage in a general drift from ergative to nominative alignment in past tenses.