ABSTRACT
Voice and Power, ed. R.J.Hayward & I.M.Lewis (ALC Supplement 3, 1996): 37-49.
1. Introduction
One of the primary characteristics of Somali is the morphological complexity of the verb and, we could add, a second is the morphosyntactic complexity of the verbal piece. Many of the ground-breaking studies of this area were written by B.W.Andrzejewski, for example Andrzejewski (1956, 1960b, 1968, 1969, 1975b). Learners of Somali soon realize that getting to grips with the verb and its associated particles is the first step in coming to terms with the language’s sentence structure. I still clearly remember Goosh Andrzejewski explaining to me in my early days of studying Somali how it is impossible to translate English prepositional phrases like from the city or about the news directly into Somali without providing a supporting verb. This paper is concerned with one crucial reason why the verbal piece is so central to the Somali clause. The background discussion is the great extent to which the predicate argument structure of a clause is marked on the verb by means of clitics, and a particular point of investigation concerns the marking of a third argument, or second object, on the verbal piece. I shall argue that a typological framework suggested by Johanna Nichols (1986) and reflected in work, for example, by Foley and Van Valin (1984) and Van Valin (1985), correctly predicts a correlation between this aspect of Somali syntax and other central features of its grammar.
