Basic Cases in the Tsova-Tush Language

摘要

The Tsova-Tush language belongs to the Nacho-Dagestanian branch of the Ibero-Caucasian language family and is spoken in the only Georgian village Zemo-Alvani by particularly low number of the native speakers. According to the current data, the number of the Tsova-Tush families is just 421, with the family members hardly about 1558 people. The dative case of the Tsova-Tush language raises an important question. The function of the Georgian language dative case is distributed among four different cases in the Tsova-Tush language. Each case has clear, distinct formant and equally clearly restricted functioning area. There are specific forms in relation to the contextual nuances of the accompanying verbs. We consider that all these four forms should be united as basic cases since the agents' relation to verbs is linked to them. Considering that these cases have common syntactic functions and have interrelation of additional distribution with each other from the viewpoint of formation, we mark them with the same name - dative- and number them on the purpose of distinguishing them from each other as follows: dative Ⅰ, dative Ⅱ, dative Ⅲ, dative Ⅳ. With such a term there will be elicited their relation to each other, on the one hand, and to Georgian, on the other. As a result, 7 basic cases can be outlined: nominative -0, ergative-s/-v, genitive-i, dative Ⅰ-n, dative Ⅱ-go, dative Ⅲ-go, dative Ⅳ-x.