6.4 Case
As mentioned above (4.2.4), case is a grammatical category which marks the relational properties of noun phrases. Estonian Sign Language does not have a case system since the form of a noun sign does not change according to its grammatical relation, nor are noun phrase dependents marked to show their relationship with the head element.
As in the case of a spoken language as, for example, English, Estonian Sign Language uses word order to indicate which relationship the noun phrase has to the verb. Compare (75) from ESL with (76) from English; NPs functioning as subject and object are indicated in bold:
| (75) a. |
HEN-SCRATCH SUDDENLY NOTICE CAT BLACK APPEARANCE LONG-THICK-HAIRS ‘(a) hen was scratching and scraping, (and) suddenly noticed a black furry cat.’ |
| b. |
CAT BLACK APPEARANCE LONG-THICK-HAIRS SUDDENLY NOTICE HEN-SCRATCH ‘(a) black furry cat suddenly noticed that hen was scratching around.’ |
| (76) a. | The snake killed the bird. (English) |
| b. | The bird killed the snake (Tallerman 1998:146). |
Estonian Sign Language relies completely on the word order strategy to convey which element is a subject, (while English, as Tallerman (1998:152-153) notes, displays the relics of a previous nominative/accusative case system in the forms of the first and third person pronouns in order to distinguish pronominal NPs functioning as objects from pronominal NPs functioning as subjects). See, for example, the following sentence (77). In example (77), pointing signs which serve to indicate 1st and 2nd person singular pronouns (see 5.4.2), are glossed as INDEX-c and INDEX-f, respectively, in order not to be mislead by the English pronoun system if presented with English glosses; the subject and object are in bold, cf.:
| (77) a. |
INDEX-cBE-AFRAID-OF INDEX-f NOT ‘I am not afraid of you’ |
| b. |
INDEX-f BE-AFRAID-OF INDEX-c NOT ‘You are not afraid of me’ |
| (78) a. | We[NOM] (Subject) like her[ACC] (Object) (English) |
| b. | She[NOM] (Subject) likes us[ACC] (Object) (Tallerman 1998:153). |
Yet, unlike spoken languages such as Malay (see example (16) in 4.2.4), Chinese, and English (except for pronouns) where the order of constituents is the only way of distinguishing the NP arguments such as the subject and the object, ESL (as well as other sign languages) also utilises inflected verb forms, that is, verb agreement, for indicating the relationship between the noun phrase participants and the predicate. Considering the limits and scope of this paper, we will not discuss verb agreement in ESL in detail. However, in order to exemplify how (Estonian) sign language can exploit its temporal and spatial dimensions for grammatical purposes, consider example (79), where the verb give agrees with the positions of two points of reference in the signing space, -f ‘hare’ and -c ‘I - the signer takes the role of the bear’ (‘hare-give-I’) (see also 5.4.2) thus marking the subject and the object:
| (79) |
BEAR STAND ON-(THE)-SHOULDER-TAP-f f-GIVE-c ONE PEA POD ‘(the) bear is standing [behind the hare], taps on the shoulder of the hare and begs [from it] one peapod.’ |
A parallel with regard to verb agreement could be drawn with the spoken language Kambera which does not have independent pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’, and where only the subject and object markers on the verb determine who is the agent and who the patient, as indicated in bold in the following example:
| (80) |
Jàka ku-karai-kai tiang ... (Kambera) if 1SG:NOM-ask-2PL:ACC later ‘If I ask you (plural) later ...’ (Tallerman 1998:147). |
As already mentioned, Estonian Sign Language does not mark noun phrase dependents to denote their relationship with the head element (for a discussion about dependent-marking and head-marking languages, see 4.3.2). In this sense, ESL resembles, for example, English which uses only separate lexical items, that is, “non-fused pre-positions” (Givon 1990:477) to indicate such relationships as place. Consider the examples in bold:
| (81) |
inthe big house (English) toward the far blue yonder (Givon 1990:477). |
In ESL, the location is indicated (or marked) by a pointing sign (index) which appears or is signed immediately after the head noun sign, cf.:
| (82) |
ROOM INDEX:INTO ‘into (the) room’ |
| (83) |
ROOM INDEX:IN ‘in (the) room’ |
| (84) |
ROOM OUT ‘out of (the) room’ |
| (85) |
TABLE NEXT-TO ‘next to (the) table’ |
With regard to the sign for ‘next’ in (85), it simultaneously indicates whether something is to the right or to the left.
In the examples about ESL (and also about English), neither the head (pointing sign/index in (82-83) and signs for OUT, NEXT-TO) nor the dependent (ROOM in (82-84), TABLE in (85)) carry any information about the relationship between the head and the dependents.