Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

OF NOMINATIVES AND DATIVES 487

Figure 9

relation is expressed uniformly by the nominative/absolutive, regardless of
which case-marking would express it in the plain inflectional form, and the
Patient is expressed by the dative, and is facultative, although in the plain
inflection this would be in the absolutive or accusative case. Note that the
intransitive clause remains unaffected by this transformation. Note further
that where there is what we would call a lexical (or adverbial) dative in the
antipassivised clause, the dative-of-Patient (NP 0 ) appears obligatorily in the
ergative, not the dative (or grammatical dative) case-marking. The antipas­
sive form of clause, we want to argue, is a normal form, in a metaphor of
normal forms of mathematical equations, which reduces the more elaborate
case-relation-to-case-marking structure of the plain inflections to a more
regimented propositional form. Every Agent or Subject case-relation is
expressed with a nominative/absolutive case-marking; every Patient case-
relation is expressed with a dative case-marking (except where bumped by
a lexical dative to the ergative case-marking, otherwise unused). From a
typological point of view, this is an "accusative" system, keeping "A" and
"S" distinct from "O," though the actual surface forms with which the
accusative principle is expressed are nominative-absolutive vs. dative. The
plain vs. normal inflectional schemata in Djirbal are summarized in Table 1.
Let us examine the overall relationship between this plain and normal
case-marking in a bit more detail. Observe that the nominative or absolu­
tive case-marking, the zero case-marking, remains functionally the same
across the two conditions, plain and normal inflection, where it expresses
the intransitive Subject for all persons and where it expresses the transitive
Agent of a first or second person, precisely those persons which are above
the split for marking Agency. Similarly, the ergative case-marking does not
remain functionally the same for any person in some case-relation. We