MORPHOLOGICAL AND SYNTACTIC CASE MARKING IN BASSA LANGUAGE: A GOVERNMENT AND BINDING APPROACH / LE CAS MORPHOLOGIQUE ET SYNTAXIQUE EN LANGUE BASSE: UNE APPROCHE GÉNÉRATIVE TRANSFORMATIONNELLE / MARCAREA CAZULUI MORFOLOGIC ŞI SINTACTIC ÎN LIMBA BASĂ: O ABORDARE GENERATIV-TRANSFORMAŢIONALĂ

Abstract

This work studies the syntactic Case in the Bassa language. It describes the process of Case assignment as it applies to Bassa language as a way of making a contribution to scholarship in an area that is highly under-described. Case refers to a noun or pronoun that shows relation to other words in a sentence. This category encodes information about a word’s grammatical role. This property of language is associated with syntactic functions of arguments such as subject, direct object, indirect object, and possessor, etc. but morphologically motivated. The investigation is situated within the Government and Binding model of the Transformational Generative theory which argues that NP/DPs are assigned Case if and only if they appear in specific positions in the sentence. It also states that the nominative Case is assigned to the specifier of finite T, the accusative is assigned by the verb, and prepositions also assign the dative Case to their complement NP/DP, all of which are determined by their positions. This study discovered that Bassa is characterized by three syntactic Cases such as the nominative, accusative and genitive Cases. Each argument in these syntactic locations has a special form which is the focus of this paper

Keywords

• morphology
• syntax
• case
• Bassa
• Government and Binding