Ergativity refers to patterning in a language whereby the subject of a transitive clause behaves differently to the subject of an intransitive clause, which behaves like the object of a transitive clause. Ergativity can be manifested in morphology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse organisation. This article overviews what is known about ergativity in the world’s languages, with a particular focus...

The paper deals with the typology of the case marking of semantic core roles. The competing economy considerations of hearer (disambiguation) and speaker (minimal effort) are formalized in terms of evolutionary game theory. It will be shown that the case marking patterns that are attested in the languages of the world are those that are evolutionary stable for different relative weightings of s...

Abstract This article examines two types of lexical effects in the voice system Kanakanavu, an Austronesian language Taiwan. The first concerns a well-attested phenomenon literature: interactions between semantic transitivity verbs and their ability (or lack thereof) to undergo alternation. second that is typologically areally rare western context – differential agent marking. pronominal Kanaka...

This article discusses two related case marking phenomena in Estonian. The first issue is representing partitive morphosemantics as it is expressed in the language specific aspectual, epistemic modal and evidential grammatical categories. A DRT based sketch of propositional attitudes and speaker-hearer relationships explicates several semantic links between the categories. The second case marki...

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 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).