The impact of attentional centering on ergative marking in Tima
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Gertrud Schneider-Blum
Abstract
One of the languages on the African continent which displays ergative features is Tima, a Niger-Congo language spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. In this contribution, the impact of attentional centering – influenced by factors including the animacy of the participants, the identifiability of the agent, and the givenness of either A or P participant – on the choice of construction between AVO and OVAerg is investigated. The research brought forth the following findings: token-identifiable human agents typically trigger an AVO constituent order; type-identifiable human agents typically trigger an OVAerg constituent order; the event described may or may not be decomposed into two sub-events; inanimate agents acting on human animates trigger a decomposition of the event into two sub-events: first, P is presented, and second, A is introduced as an ergative-marked participant following the verb. The information structural device of givenness interacts with the two parameters of agent-identifiability and animacy. A given agent always leads to an AVO construction. A given patient finds the speaker faced with the choice of opting for an AVO or an OVAerg construction.
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was made possible through a generous grant from the German Research Foundation for the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1252 (Project-ID 281511265) at the University of Cologne, within which Tima has the project ‘Split ergativity in Tima’. I would like to express my sincere thanks to the foundation. I would also like to thank Birgit Hellwig, Gerrit Dimmendaal and Nikolaus Himmelmann for their detailed and helpful comments on different aspects dealt within this contribution. Likewise, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their critical and useful examination of this paper. Special thanks go to Beatrice Primus († 2019) for her enthusiastic input during the first phase of the SFB. I would furthermore like to thank Zoë Braven-Giles and Mary Chambers for correcting the English at different stages of writing. And last but not least, my thanks go to Hamid Kafi Daldoum for his endless patience with me.
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