Nominative for recipient

Here's a very odd noun marking system that I dreamt up over lunch. I'm
hoping somebody can ANADEW it.

Suppose we have a SVO language with nominative/accusative marking. If two
clauses share an object, they are chained together, with the object omitted
from the first clause.

NOM1 VERB1 NOM2 VERB2 ACC

Seems straighforward enough. A ditransitive sentence would then be along
the lines of

NOM1 "give" NOM2 "get" ACC

Now, it will be very common for the second verb in such a construction to
be a complement of the first, as above. Once you get a verb followed by a
second nominative, you are able to work out from context what the second
verb should be in most cases. Therefore, it becomes increasingly common for
the second verb to be omitted.

NOM1 "give" NOM2 ACC

You therefore have a noun marking system where

Nominative is used for subjects and indirect objects

Accusative is used for direct objects.

I think that this system has a very nice combination of weirdness and
plausibility.

Pete

Reply