Notes sur la coordination verbale et la coréférence intraphrastique en basque souletin

Abstract

In the opinion of a great many Basque linguists, if Basque is a language of "ergative morphology", then its "syntax" is "accusative". So as to justify this posture, we base ourselves on, among other things, both the co-reference phenomena found in complex sentences and instances from sentences containing co-ordinated verbs. In these contexts, the omittable (non-repeated) substantive would be the one that refers to the unique participant in the absolutive case (PU abs), or the one referring to the agent in the ergative case (A erg).

By studying the conditions that allow substantives to be left out in sentences with verbs co-ordinated by eta in Souletine Basque, the author reached the conclusion that this event could not be linked to any real syntactic necessity. In the case of co-reference, the nominal in the ergative case (which refers to the agent, A erg) is not systematically dropped. The conditions are far more complex: depending on the kind of statement, either semantic coherence or the condition of being the stem or the element being focussed on, etc. Come into play. PU abs or A erg-type substantives are those least often repeated due to the fact that they frequently adopt the following characteristics: stem, agent and definite. This kind of construction involving two substantives within the same clause are uncommon, and, because of the risk of causing ambiguity, verbal co-ordination leaving one of the substantives unrepeated would appear to be none too usual.