Some thoughts about Manchu case markers’ ellipsis and implication
(64th Meeting Budapest, 2022)
The Manchu linguistics is an important but still a relatively minor subbranch of the Manchu studies. And for Manchu grammar, the two major parts, are the nominal case markers and the verbal conjugation.
In the Classical written Manchu language, there are “i, be, de, ci, deri”, for the case markers as genitive, instrumental, accusative, dative, locative, ablative, prolative. Then for these postpositional nominal case markers, it happens sometimes the ellipsis, and mostly with the genitive and the accusative. Meanwhile, the genitive “i” and the accusative “be”, could also perform the function to distinguish the principal and subordinate clauses. All these is important to comprehend the subjects and the objects of the sentence. Therefore, my intention is to rethink these functions, by the corpus of inscriptions from my previous fieldwork. And if possible, to have some discussions with these features.
References
Tsumagari, Toshiro. 2006. “Morphological status of the Manchu case markers: particle
or suffix?” Manchu Studies in Honour of Giovanni Stary. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
Verlag.
Larsen, Thomas W. 2007. “Instrumental Noun Phrases and Unmarked Objects in Clas-
sical Manchu” Proceedngs of the First North American Conference on Manchu Studies.
Vol. 2, Studies in Manchu Linguistics. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.