Abstract This paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present corpus-based investigation word order the variety Russian spoken Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, nonstandard GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained terms syntactic ca...

This study charts the development of the genitive masculine inflection, one of the most irregular parts of the Polish case-marking system. 72 Polish children aged from 2;3 to 10;8 participated in a nonce word production experiment testing their ability to supply the genitive form and their sensitivity to the semantic factors determining the choice of ending. Results indicate that productivity, ...

Possessives are “complex” DPs: they involve two distinct nominal expressions as components.1 In this paper I address the issue of characterizing the nature of the syntactic relation holding between these two nominal expressions in possessives whose possessum is arguably not a syntactic argument-taking category. This task can be divided into two parts: (i) providing an account of what licenses t...

In the formation of extended noun phrases, expressions are used that describe some dimension. Weight is described by each of the prenominal expressions in heavy rock, too much ballast, 2 lb rock, 2 lbs of rocks. The central claim of this paper is that the position of these types of expressions within the noun phrase limits the kinds of dimensions they may describe. The limitations have to do wi...

Kemmerer, Tranel, and Zdanczyk (2009) reported patients who failed to discriminate between preferred and dispreferred orders of prenominal adjectives, yet were sensitive to the order of adjectives in relation to other parts of speech, and able to judge which of two adjectives was most similar to a cue adjective. The authors concluded that knowledge of the semantic constraints on prenominal adje...