Bidirectional case markers in West African languages, including those of the Songhay family, are morphemes inserted between subject and object NPs that would otherwise be adjacent. They therefore specify both that the NP to the left is a subject, and that the NP to the right is an object, and they cannot be bracketed uniquely with either. This is shown by the fact that these morphemes are absen...

This study investigates the nature of Nominative case in Korean, focusing on multiple Nom constructions, a phenomenon which has been the main source for differing views on Nom case. The study evaluates two opposing syntactic views of Nom case in Korean: default case approach vs structural case approach, by examining the time course of acquisition for relevant constructions using an experimental...

The analysis of opaque relations presents a problem to classic Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993), inherently a surface-oriented theory. Many different proposals have been made to integrate the analysis of opacity into OT. In this paper, we address the problem of opacity in Tundra Nenets (TN), a Uralic (Samoyedic) language spoken in Arctic Russia and No...

The Lindstrom marking algorithm uses bounded workspace. Its time complexity is O(n) in all cases, but it has been assumed that the average case time complexity is O(n lg n). It is proven that the average case time complexity is Θ(n). Similarly, the average size of the Wegbreit bit stack is shown to be Θ(n).

Recent theoretical descriptions of the Icelandic case system distinguish between lexicai and structural case. Lexical case is assigned in ttle lexiCOIl, whereas structural case is assigned in syntax, under tim provision that it does not override lexicai case assignment. This analysis is problematic for grammatical theories such as Categorial Unification Grammar (CUG) and Headdriven Phrase Struc...