I argue that patterns of case syncretism across languages can be modelled by partially, rather than totally, ordered hierarchies. Partially hierarchies avoid the need for postulating multiple instances same while retaining contiguity in representation syncretism. discuss data from three which differential object marking is syncretic with dative and show partially capture these other line some c...

The aim of this paper is to explain the differential object marking (DOM) inanimate objects in Spanish. Generally, animate Spanish are marked with an A morpheme; however, it possible for A-marker appear also specific circumstances. In article, I defend idea that a lexical feature verb (the presupposition existence) must be licensed organizing node dominates specificity features. V inherits from...

In this study we investigate the impact of affectedness on the diachronic development of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish. DOM in Spanish synchronically depends on (i) the referential features of the direct object, such as animacy and referentiality, and (ii) the semantics of the verb. Several studies have also shown that the diachronic development of DOM proceeds along the Animacy ...

In two visual word eye tracking studies, we investigated the influence of prosody and case marking on children’s and adults’ thematic role assignment. We assigned an SVO/ OVS-biasing (vs. neutral) prosodic contour to unambiguously case marked German subject-verb-object (SVO) and object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences respectively. Scenes depicted ambiguous action events (e.g., donkey-paints->eleph...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not Japanese children with specific language impairment (henceforth; SLI) would in fact experience difficulty with grammatical case-marking. The participants were 10 Japanese children with SLI, aged 7;7 to 11;4, and 25 Japanese children with typical language development (henceforth; TLD), aged 8;11 to 9;11. In this study, a sentence comple...

This work follows the progression of a grammatical construction that unifies the Romanian accusative preposition pe with a coreferential pronominal clitic, together forming the cd-pe construction. On the basis of historical texts, it is argued that these two grammatical phenomena evolved into a clause-level construction with a dedicated semantics and pragmatics in the modern language. A corpus ...

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance productio...

Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a prevalent phenomenon in the world’s languages in which the case marking of the object NP is determined by certain semantic factors. Notions such as “animacy”, “definiteness”, “specificity”, and “topicality” are often invoked to explain the semantic contribution of the case marker in languages with DOM. In this paper, I investigate the semantic contribution...

Many authors have argued that there exists a relation between case morphology, on the one hand, and semantic interpretation, on the other. A recurrent pattern is that the presence of overt case corresponds with a strong interpretation, i.e., definite, specific, whereas the absence of case corresponds with a weak interpretation, i.e., indefinite, non-specific. In this paper we argue on the basis...