Objective Conjugation
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.
Objective Conjugation
a principle of verbal inflection, according to which a verb form indicates not one but several (two to four) individuals, all participants in the action (a subject and its objects). Objective conjugation is characteristic of languages of the ergative type. A special kind of objective conjugation, widespread in other types of languages as well, is a two-part conjugation with prefixes or both prefixes and suffixes. An example is seen in the Kabardin u-e-s-tashch (“you to him I gave”), where u- is the affix for the second person, e- for the third, and s- for the first.
G. A. KLIMOV
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.