Geniti vization in Northern Basque Complement Clauses

I will begin with a brief review of some basic aspects of Basque clause structure (1). In main clauses, the verbal complex contains obligatory marking of pronominal categories in ergative, absolutive, and dative cases. Ergative is the case of transitive subjects (TS's), absolutive that of transitive objects and intransitive subjects (TO's, IS's), and dative that of indirect objects. In modern Basque. these pronominal markers are ordinarily added to a special auxiliary verb, while the main verb has only an aspect suffix (periphrastic conju-gation); only a few verbs can optionally add the pronominal markers directly (synthetic conjugation). The predominant periphrastic type can be illustrated by this example (Guipuzcoan dialect): ( 1) txakurr- a il- tzen det dog the kill asp 1s-3s The notation «1s-3s » indicates first singular ergative plus third singular absolutive, so the translation is «I am killing the dog». The overt TO txakurr-a has no case suffix, since ahsolutive is the un-marked case. If the independent first singular pronoun were added, (1) It is a pleasure to thank Prof. Michelenaanc Prof. De Rijk for their helpfulness to me, and the Nevada Basque Studies Program staff in general. I also wish to thank Prof. Haritschelhar of Bordeaux for answering my questions on his Low Navarrese dialect. Prof. De Rijk also suggested several factual and stylistic changes which have been incorporated-into the final version of the paper