Competing morphemes in Toba beneficiary marking

CENSABELLA, MARISA

Zurich, Suiza

Workshop; Workshop on the Typology of Benefactives and Malefactives; 2007

Universidad de Zurich

This paper will examine the syntactic and semantic characteristics of some applicative morphemes and their distribution around the semantic notions of beneficiary, recipient, human goal in Toba. In this preliminary sketch we have observed that: Toba does not have ditransitive verbs, that is non-derivated verbs that require the presence of three arguments (agent, theme and recipient) in a clause. To incorporate more than two arguments, it is necessary to use applicatives. The verb ‘to give’ is a derivated one. The alignment system of ditansitive clauses is the ‘secundative’ type; the recipient of the bitranstive behaves as the pacient of the transitive, taking the same functional slot, showing the same criteria for indexing plural arguments, and allowing the non-promotional passive to take place. Applicativazation via locative and directional notions is the main strategy to introduce non-subject arguments in ditransitive clauses: there is scale of degree of affectedness that triggers the selection of one of the four morphemes related to human locative goals and recipients. The benefactive marker -em is usually used to express both the notions of reception and benefaction; it is also used to express the notion of solely benefaction with antipassivized transitive verbs. Thus, following Kittilä’s (2005: 277) classification Toba is a ´beneficiary prominent´ language.The benefactive morpheme -em ressembles one of the recipient morphemes and the topicalization marker with demostratives.Regarding the marking ofrecipients and when the semantics of verb allows it, this language has a split based on an affectedness scale to select the recipient marker.