Verbs of ingestion in Erzya, the ablative object?

Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation

Description

abstract: This presentation approaches the partitive function in Erzya verbs of ingestion. The verbs of ingestion, ‘eat’, ‘drink’, ‘smoke’, ‘breathe’, etc. are notorious in Erzya and Moksha for their collocation with direct objects in the ablative case, with partitive function. As Erzya does not have one specific case for marking the direct object, Kolâdënkov (1954: 47) indicates four separate cases used for indicating the direct object: nominative, genitive as well as the ablative and inessive.
We find that verbs of ingestion with their partitive-function arguments have not been studied in causative structures. We, therefore, direct the audience’s attention to the use of the partitive-function ablative in conjunction with the other direct objects indicated above.
We demonstrate that the partitive-function ablative co-occurs with both genitive- and inessive-case direct objects. Whereas the genitive- and inessive-case direct objects mark the causee and are in complementary distribution, the ablative-case partitive function can co-occur freely with them but is not an obligatory argument of the verbs of ingestion.
We also contemplate the partitive function in light of two Erzya passive strategies and find that it does not participate in either, but rather it can occur in passivized sentences without undergoing any change.
Finally, aware that the partitive function is not an obligatory argument, nor does it participate in passive promotion, we ask, what syntactic dependency the ablative-case partitive function has, as it can be found in non-causative as well as causative and passive contexts with co-occurring direct objects.
PeriodAug 2022
Event titleCongressus XIII Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum
Event typeConference
LocationVienna, AustriaShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

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