No case before the verb, obligatory case after the verb in Coptic

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

This paper presents a hitherto unnoticed fact about the coding of grammatical relations in Coptic: while postverbal core arguments must be overtly case-marked (or “flagged”), preverbal core arguments are never case-marked. This feature extends the “no case before the verb in northeastern Africa” generalization ( König 2008; 2009) to the northeastern Mediterranean. Moreover, the analysis presented here reveals Coptic to be another case of an uncommon system of core argument marking, namely, “marked S/A vs. marked P”.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEgyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective
EditorsEitan Grossman, Martin Haspelmath, Tonio Sebastian Richter
PublisherDe Gruyter Mouton
Pages203-226
Number of pages24
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014

Publication series

Name Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT]
Volume55

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'No case before the verb, obligatory case after the verb in Coptic'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this