Asimetrías gramaticales asociadas a la animacidad en la lengua vasca: una perspectiva tipológica / Animacy-based grammatical asymmetries in Basque: a typological perspective

Abstract

This study provides a typological analysis of two phenomena related to case-marking in Basque. In both of them, animacy —or the distinction between what is animate and what is not— turns out to be determinant: we discuss case assignment to direct objects, on the one hand, and marking of locative cases, on the other hand. We have compared the two phenomena with diverse typological parallels in order to account for the variety of possible morphological strategies and identify particular conditions and restrictions. Furthermore, we have argued that differential object marking in Basque is a recent phenomenon, induced by language contact, whereas differential locative marking has an intralinguistic nature. Finally, we have defended that the role of animacy in both types of differential marking is different: in the first example it conditions case assignment and in the second it operates as a grammatical gender.