This paper provides a unified account of construction alternations in which case markers are involved, extending the traditional focus on the differential use of core case markers (DCM). Using an Optimality Theoretic framework, it is argued that the optional use of morphological case can be explained by the interaction of an economy and cooperativeness principle.

Majority of Bantu languages encode subjects by head-marking and objects by positional licensing. This reflects a point in the historical process whereby positional licensing of objects becomes obligatory due to the loss of inflecctional morphology. What we observe in synchronic grammar is considerable variation both across and within languages in the use of head-marking morphology for objects. ...

Background: Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is revealed with the left ventricular dilatation and systolic dysfunction. This study was performed to determine the level of Calcitonin Gene Related Peptide (CGRP) and Brain Natriuretic Peptide (BNP) in children with dilated cardiomyopathy and controls and comparison of these two biomarkers in patients. Materials and Methods: This case-control study was...

Romanian is a language which exhibits differential object marking (DOM) using the particle pe and (in most cases) a clitic pronoun (Niculescu 1965, Pan -Dindelegan 1997, von Heusinger & Onea 2008, Stark & Sora 2008). Direct object case marking is optional with human indefinite direct objects, as in (1), and almost obligatory with postverbal human definite direct objects, as reflected in the con...

Case is often treated as an uninteresting part of computational processing (both parsing and generation). In the mainly free word order South Asian languages, case plays a theoretically well established role in syntactic and semantic processing. Case is used not only to help identify grammatical relations (e.g., ergatives indicate subjects), but also contributes significantly to the semantic an...

The animacy distinction is deeply rooted in the language faculty. A key example is differential object marking, the phenomenon where animate sentential objects receive specific marking. We used event-related potentials to examine the neural processing consequences of case-marking violations on animate and inanimate direct objects in Spanish. Inanimate objects with incorrect prepositional case m...