Cagliari, Italy  15-18 September 2003

ALT V Conference

Denis Creissels

 Are there 'indirect objects' in African languages?
denis.creissels@univ-lyon2.fr

Syntacticians commonly use a notion of ‚indirect object‘ relying on the hypothesis that:

(a)   languages, in addition to subject and direct objet, tendto have a third core syntactic function, called ‚indirect object‘;

(b)   in the construction of trivalent verbs with an argument frame similar to that of ‚give‘ (transfer verbs), the transferred thing is generally encoded as a direct object (i.e. syntactically treated in the same way as the patient of typical bivalent verbs), whereas the third core syntactic function ‚indirect object‘ typically serves to encode the recipient of such verbs.

In this paper, I argue that African languages provide considerable evidence against the hypothesis of the universality of this third core grammatical relation.

The traditional notion of ‚indirect object‘ applies without difficulty to situations in which:

- with respect to case marking or combination with adpositions, in the construction of verbs semantically similar to ‚give‘, the noun phrase representing the transferred thing is treated in the same way as the patient of prototypical two argument verbs, whereas the noun phrase representing the recipient receives a treatment that distinguishes it both from direct objects and from allative complements of motion verbs;

- the object markers that refer to the patient of prototypical two argument verbs can also be used, in the construction of transfer verbs, to encode the transferred thing, whereas special pronominal markers (such as the dative clitics of Romance languages) are used to encode the recipient.

Transfer verbs with constructions that meet these conditions are particularly common among European languages, but there are other possible ways of organizing the construction of transfer verbs, as shown in the following typology of transfer verb constructions:

-   type I: the argument that fully assimilates to the patient of prototypical transitive verbs is the transferred thing, with a subdivision between type Ia (the recipient is treated as an oblique) and type Ib (there exists a third core grammatical relation

- ‚indirect object‘ or ‚dative‘ - typically used to encode the recipient of transfer verbs);

-   type II: the argument that fully assimilates to the patient of prototypical transitive verbs is the recipient, with a subdivision between type IIa (the transferred thing is treated as an oblique) and type IIb (the noun phrase representing the transferred thing shows no obvious indication of an oblique status, and has at least some objectal properties – ‚double object constructions‘).

Type IIb calls for the following remark: in ‚double object constructions‘, the two ‚objects‘ always differ in the extent to which they possess the properties that characterize prototypical objects of bivalent action verbs. In some languages (for example in Tswana) the difference is minimal, in other languages (for example in Swahili) one of the two ‚objects‘ has very few objectal properties, but the noun-phrase representing the recipient is always more object-like than that representing the transferred thing, which justifies the treatment of ‚double object constructions‘ as a sub-type of type II, and not as a sub-type of type I, or as a third type.

Type Ib, particularly common among European languages (which explains the tendency of many grammarians to postulate the universality of the ‚indirect object‘) is not common in Africa. In particular, in most language families included in the Niger-Congo phylum (with the exception of Mande), the predominance of type IIb is obvious, and I know of no Niger-Congo language whose case marking or indexation system would justify the introduction of a grammatical relation ‚indirect object‘:

-  as regards case marking, the recipient is most often treated in the same way as the patient of prototypical transitive verbs, and when this is not the case, there seems to be no evidence supporting the recognition of a ‚dative‘ affix or adposition with properties significantly different from those marking oblique functions;

-  in pronominalization, the recipient is treated, either in the same way as the patient of prototypical transitive verbs, or as an oblique: to the best of my knowledge, sets of pronominal markers functionally similar to the dative clitics of Romance languages have never been mentioned in descriptions of Niger-Congo languages.