ON EXCEPTIONAL CASE-MARKING IN JAPANESE AND ENGLISH

Exceptional Case Marking in the Xtag System

The Proleptic Accusative as an exceptional Exceptional Case Marking construction

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the so-called proleptic accusative. This construction type is rare, but attested in a number of different languages. Here, we discuss data from Middle Dutch in particular, which enables us to shed new light on the matter. We show that the proleptic accusative is crucially different from complex cases of raising. Instead, we explore two novel and compet...

Communicative efficiency in language production: Optional case-marking in Japanese

Grammatical encoding is one of the earliest stages in linguistic encoding. One broadly accepted view holds that grammatical encoding is primarily or exclusively affected by production ease, rather than communicative considerations. This contrasts with proposals that speakers’ preferences during grammatical encoding reflect a trade-off between production ease and communicative goals. In three re...

Grammatical case-marking in Japanese children with SLI.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not Japanese children with specific language impairment (henceforth; SLI) would in fact experience difficulty with grammatical case-marking. The participants were 10 Japanese children with SLI, aged 7;7 to 11;4, and 25 Japanese children with typical language development (henceforth; TLD), aged 8;11 to 9;11. In this study, a sentence comple...

Language as Lens: Plurality Marking and Numeral Learning in English, Japanese, and Russian

In a child’s life, language development and conceptual development clearly happen at the same time. But how are these processes related? Is language more like a set of labels for already-formed concepts, or more like a lens that affects the concepts as they are formed? In fact, language must do both of these things, but this paper argues that, for one kind of concept (numbers), during one devel...