The “marked nominative” in Datooga

Abstract

The case system of Datooga, a Southern Nilotic dialect cluster of Northern and Central Tanzania, is of the marked nominative type, i.e., it is based on the opposition of a nominative case which encodes both the subject of an intransitive verb (S) and the subject of a transitive one (A) vs. an accusative case which encodes the object of a transitive verb (P). However, in contrast to prototypical nominative/accusative systems, it is the nominative case rather than the accusative which receives morphological marking in Datooga. This unusual marking pattern reflects an unusual division of labour between the case forms, the marked nominative being confined to the function of coding S and A in pragmatically neutral clauses, whereas the unmarked “accusative”, or “absolute” as it will be called further on, takes over a wide range of functions apart from coding P, e.g., it characterizes the citation form, nouns in non-verbal predication and preverbal subjects. Thus, what at first glance appears as an odd and outlandish markedness paradox from a general typological perspective turns out to be a very economical case system at closer inspection of the syntactic distribution and functional load of the opposing case forms.