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Argument Selectors: A new perspective on grammatical relations
Edited by Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Balthasar Bickel
[Typological Studies in Language 123] 2019
► pp. 511–531

Grammatical relations in Katla

| University of Cologne

This chapter describes grammatical relations in Katla, a Niger-Congo language of Sudan. Katla exhibits a close match between semantic and syntactic valency, and monovalent, bivalent and trivalent verbs can be distinguished by their ability to occur with one, two or three unmarked arguments respectively. Katla shows evidence for the existence of a subject category (including S, A and ADITR, whereby ‘DITR’ as subscript arguments) and of a primary object category (including P and G arguments; but excluding T arguments). Evidence for these categories comes from argument indexing, constituent order and valency-changing morphology. Other potential argument selectors are also discussed, but they provide inconclusive evidence. The chapter concludes with a brief comparison to the closest relative, Tima, showing considerable differences between the two languages.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Grammatical relations
    • 2.1Indexing of arguments on the verb
    • 2.2Constituent order
    • 2.3Derivational morphology: Causatives, applicatives
      • 2.3.1Causatives
      • 2.3.2Applicatives
    • 2.4External possession
    • 2.5Co-referential arguments across clauses
    • 2.6Secondary predicates
  • 3.Summary
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.123.14hel
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