Abstract
The present article investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of verbs with optionally three participants in Jalonke. Jalonke, a variety of Yalunka, belongs to the Mande group of the Niger-Congo language stock and is spoken in and around Guinea (West Africa). In contrast to languages with ditransitive verbs, Jalonke has no verbs with three arguments. Rather, the third participant of the verbs in question is realized in a postpositional phrase, just like an adjunct, and is not distinguishable from adjuncts on semantic and syntactic grounds. The article gives an overview of the postpositions involved in the marking of the third participant of verbs whose second or third participants are Recipients, Beneficiaries, and to a lesser extent, Experiencers, since these are the roles attested across languages for verbs encoding three-participant events. Jalonke verbs with optionally three participants are explored according to two parameters of variation: the thematic roles and linking properties of their second and third participants and the alternation attested for verbs and classes of verbs. The article further systematizes which of the crosslinguistically attested linking patterns occur in Jalonke, and which semantic parameters govern differences between semantically related verbs and constructions in the language.
© Walter de Gruyter
