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On the Case System of Berber

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Mohand Guerssel
Mohand Guerssel*
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
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Extract

The morphological shape of a noun in Berber is determined by the syntactic context in which it appears. The alternation is between what has come to be known as the Construct State and the Free State. Since the alternation is syntactically determined, it has been suggested that the State phenomenon may be a form of case (cf. Prasse 1974; Chaker 1983; Bader and Kenstowicz 1984; Ouhalla 1988). But the link between Case and State has not been established in a conclusive manner. One reason why the nature of the Construct State has remained a puzzling aspect of Berber is that the contexts in which the Construct State forms appear and those where the Free State forms appear do not seem to constitute natural classes. For instance, most prepositions take a Construct State complement, but some take Free State forms. The subject of a verb in the VSO order is in the Construct but a left dislocated subject is not. The object of a verb is in the Free State, but when it is clitic doubled it is in the Construct State.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 37 , Issue 2: Numéro Spécial Functional Categories , June 1992 , pp. 175 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1992

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References

1 This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant 411-85-0012 and FCAR grant 87-EQ-2681. I wish to thank Claire Lefebvre, John Lumsden, Lisa Travis for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The main dialect described here is that of Ait Seghrouchen, spoken in the middle Atlas in Morocco. Unless otherwise indicated, the term Berber refers to this dialect. The following notation is used: c = voiceless palatal fricative, cc = voiceless geminate palatal affricate, j = voiced palatal fricative, gh = voiced uvular fricative, e = the epenthetic material commonly referred to in the Berber linguistic literature as schwa. All other symbols are standard. Many phonological changes have been suppressed in the examples so that morphemes can be easily identified. For instance, wwattas ‘of the bucket’ is represented as n wattas, deggwurtu ‘in the garden’ as dy wurtu, and so on.

2 For an analysis of the phonological alternations of the construct state, see Guerssel (1976, 1983).

3 For the moment the internal structure of the KPs in (4b) is not indicated. An explicit representation of such a KP type will be provided later.

4 There is only one exception to this statement. A noun takes a KP complement only in genitive constructions. The question as to why this is the case will be returned to.

5 Again, the internal structure of the KP in (16b) is not explicitly represented. An explicit representation will be provided later.

6 To the best of my knowledge, the analysis proposed in the text may be applied to all the dialects of Morocco and northern Algeria. A special note is in order, though. In some Berber dialects, there are three prepositions, not two as in Ait Seghrouchen. The third one is s ‘toward’, which is homophonous with the case marker s ‘instrumental’. This is the case in Ait Ayache, a dialect spoken in the Middle Atlas in Morocco. In Ait Ayache, besides bla ‘without’ and al ‘until’, the goal preposition s contrasts in an interesting way with the case marker ghur ‘toward’ (Ait Seghrouchen gher). The preposition s takes complements where the head noun is animate, the case marker ghur takes DPs where the head noun is inanimate. The preposition s appears with the so-called Free State, while ghur takes the so-called Construct State, exactly as expected.

7 Examples of Bare-NP adverbs are the other day and this way, as in I saw him the other day and He hit it this way.

8 The sentence in (37) could be rendered grammatical only if the quantified NP is left-dislocated: Kull aryaz yswu aghi ‘Every man drank milk’.