In (1a), the verb shows subject agreement with 'Alemu (3sm)' and object agreement with 'the dead cat (3sm)'. Probably due to the strong verbal agreement, a null pronominal (‘pro’) can be used as the subject (or the object), as in (1b). Besides agreement-marking, Chaha verbs host prefixes to yield transitivity alternations, passivization, and causativization. Hetzron’s (1977) summary of the thre...

............................................................................................................................... 1 1 Introducing inanimate unergatives ...................................................................................... 2 1.1 The domain of intransitive verbs ..................................................................................... 2 1.2 The domain of...

In this work we analyze objects with non-canonical case markers in Turkish. We show that semantic factors give rise to non-canonical case marking and try to determine criteria to decide on the grammatical function status of non-canonical objects. We conclude that ablative partitives and dative objects participating in an affectedness alternation should be analyzed as straightforward objects (OB...

This paper investigates the use of sublexical units as a solution to handling the complex morphology with productive derivational processes, in the development of a lexical functional grammar for Turkish. Such sublexical units make it possible to expose the internal structure of words with multiple derivations to the grammar rules in a uniform manner. This in turn leads to more succinct and man...

An attractor, in complex systems theory, is any state that is more easily or more often entered or acquired than departed or lost; attractor states therefore accumulate more members than non-attractors, other things being equal. In the context of language evolution, linguistic attractors include sounds, forms, and grammatical structures that are prone to be selected when sociolinguistics and la...

Abstract This paper offers new evidence from Stau, Geshiza, and Khroskyabs to address the question of directionality in valency-changing derivations Sino-Tibetan. Examining causative anticausative verb stem pairs adds that Proto-Sino-Tibetan, a number intransitive stems are derived transitive stems, some cases as result * N ‑ prefixation, other voicing alternation independent prefixation. In ad...

This paper presents yet another argument for the view that both the causative and inchoative verbs in the Japanese causative alternation are syntactically equally complex, derived independently from common bases. While morphological considerations alone suggest that such an approach must be taken to account for cases involving equipollent alternations, which have overt morphemes for both the ca...

This paper studies the syntactic properties of two Chinese function words ba and bei from a Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) perspective. It is proposed that they be identified as multi-valence prepositions or co-verbs that share the argument-taking characteristic of verbs and play the role of syntactic head (vs. semantic head) in organizing a sentence and determining the unexpressed grammatica...