The marking of spatial relations on animate nouns in Basque
A diachronic quantitative corpus study
This corpus-based study examines the diachrony of differential place marking in Basque. In spatial cases, animate
nouns in Basque exhibit heavier morphological forms than inanimate ones, but, under some circumstances, they can also be marked as
inanimate. The data for the study comprises 66 sixteenth-to-twentieth-century texts (9,791 examples). A generalised linear
mixed-effects model was fitted to analyse factors influencing the choice of marking. It is shown that animate nouns are sensitive
to different aspects of the extended Animacy Hierarchy. The strongest effect is that of number (singular nouns prefer animate
marking), followed by referentiality (pronouns are more prone to take animate forms than other nominals) and definiteness
(definite nouns show animate marking more often than indefinite ones). The analysis also shows that animate marking became more
widespread, and that there are dialectal differences. Moreover, more factors were relevant for the alternation in the earliest
data (number, referentiality, definiteness, person and case) than in the most recent texts, where number is the most
important.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Basque spatial cases and animacy
- 3.Research questions
- 4.Methodology
- 4.1Generalised linear mixed-effects models
- 4.2Corpus
- 4.3Variables
- 5.Analysis
- 5.1Descriptive statistics
- 5.2Model fitting and model selection
- 5.3Effects of the predictors
- 5.4Random effects
- 5.5Further analyses
- 6.Discussion and conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
References
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