Making the remarkable regular: 'Marked absolutive' in Nias

This paper re-examines the unusual ‘marked absolutive’ argument marking pattern in Nias Selatan. While previous works propose that Nias instantiates a ‘marked absolutive’ case pattern (Brown 2001; 2005; Baker 2015), this paper argues against this approach. Instead, Nias’ argument marking system is shown to be a morpho-phonological process, which is unrelated to case, and that Nias’ ‘marked absolutive’ pattern is due to a conspiracy of this process’ sensitivity to syntactic domains (i.e. phases) interacting with independently active syntactic operations unrelated to case. Moreover, it is shown that this analysis is consequential in regards to the typology of attested case patterns. In addition, it is shown that Nias’ argument marking system is an instance of a class of cross-linguistically attested morpho-phonological processes that are sensitive to syntactic domains in the same manner.