| Abstrakt: |
In spite of its widespread nature in the Nilo-Saharan phylum, the differential marking of objects as constituents with or without an explicit case marker has gone virtually unnoticed in the typological literature. The present contribution gives a survey of this economy principle in three Nilo-Saharan subgroups, Fur, Maban, and Eastern Sudanic, where Differential Object Marking extends to ditransitive clauses as well as adjuncts under certain conditions. The governing principles in these Nilo-Saharan languages are in accordance with more general principles of discourse prominence, involving features like animacy and definiteness. But the data from this phylum also suggest that this two-dimensional system needs to be extended into another dimension, the categorical/thetic contrast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
