Case and Agreement

Agreement: A partial specification based on Slavonic data

by Greville G. Corbett

Greville G. Corbett. 1986. Agreement: a partial specification, based on Slavonic data. Linguistics, 24, no. 6, 995 1023.

Agreement. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics

by Greville G. Corbett

Greville G. Corbett. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Conjugation classes in Estonian

by J P Blevins

Linguistica Uralica XLIII.4 (2007), 250-267.

Review of The Syntax of Object Marking in Sambaa, by Kristina Riedel

by Daniel Hieber

Book review published with Linguist List

Review of The Study of Language, 4th edition, by George Yule

by Daniel Hieber

Book review published with Linguist List

Declension classes in Estonian

by J P Blevins

Linguistica Uralica XLIV.4 (2008) 241-267.

Case and declensional paradigms

by J P Blevins

Chapter 13 in A. Malchukov & A. Spencer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Case (2008). Oxford: Blackwell, 200-218.

Defining 'subgender': virile and devirilized nouns in Polish

by Dunstan Brown

Brown, Dunstan. (1998) 'Defining 'subgender': virile and devirilised nouns in Polish'. Lingua, 104, pp. 187-233.

The Semantic and Pragmatic Role of Case Marking in Formal Spoken Arabic

by Alexander Magidow

Masters Thesis - University of Texas at Austin

This thesis explores the phenomenon of variable use of case marking in spoken formal Arabic in search of... more This thesis explores the phenomenon of variable use of case marking in spoken formal Arabic in search of extra-syntactic meanings. The thesis rejects the views that case marking is constrained primarily by speakers' ability in Standard Arabic, or that case marking is implicated solely in code-switching. Instead, the study takes a holistic approaches and attempts to determine whether the use and non-use of case marking operates as a meaningful linguistic system. This thesis consists of two chapters: in the first, a subset of the data is analyzed quantitatively, while the second treats the data qualitatively. The data for the study was taken from publicly broadcast Arabic language television programs.

The primary finding is that the choice between use and non-use of case marking operates as a linguistic system, and that case marking is used primarily to mark highly salient nouns in the discourse. This thesis also finds that this system extends to pragmatics, including register variation and maintainance, as well as politeness strategies. Finally, the study discusses the role that case marking plays in the construction of a speaker's linguistic style. These findings support the theory that syntactically optional elements of speech are often conditioned and meaningful beyond the level of syntax.

The final version of the thesis is available at:
http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2009-05-130

Inverse Systems, Hierarchy Effects and Specificity in Syntax

by Jakob Hamann

Manuscript

This article proposes a new analysis of direction systems that has as its central claim that the concept of... more This article proposes a new analysis of direction systems that has as its central claim that the concept of specificity often applied in morphological theory is active in syntactic derivations, too (cf. Lahne 2008, 2009). A formal theory of ϕ-features that incorporates aspects of Béjar & Řezáč's (2009) feature-segment approach provides the right tool to derive hierarchy effects in a straightforward way. Being specificity-driven, Agree can involve a more distant goal G if G is more specific than a potential closer goal H. The functional head T is argued to be the locus of ϕ-features (cf. Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2006). Agree can thus hold between T and the external argument (EA) in a direct context (when EA is more specific than the internal argument (IA)), and between T and IA in an inverse context (when IA is more specific than EA). Overt direction marking is reanalyzed as agreement in Case: a Case feature on T receives a particular value as a by-product of ϕ-Agree with EA or IA, which have been assigned Case values earlier in the derivation, viz. on the vP level (cf. Sigurðsson 2000). Furthermore, the asymmetric agreement patterns observed in Inverse languages receive explanation if the assumption is made that operation-inducing features on functional heads are ordered. The analysis is also shown to cover agreement patterns in languages not showing any instances of hierarchy effects.

(2010c) Theta Theory Revisited

by Diego Gabriel Krivochen

I am grateful to Angel Gallego and Juan Stamboni for their valuble comments on earlier versions. Needless to say, all remaining errors are entirely my own.

In this paper we critically revise the history of semantic interpretation in Generative Grammar, from early ST to the... more In this paper we critically revise the history of semantic interpretation in Generative Grammar, from early ST to the MP, and then propose our own model of thematic relations as semantic functions read in the LF interface level. In our road to "Radical Minimalism" (Krivochen, 2011a, b), we try to dispense with checking / matching theory and the concept of "assignment". Our framework, as usual, will be the MP (as a program, not as a theory) and Relevance Theory.

Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features.

by Sonja Eisenbeiss

Authors: Penke, Martina, Janssen, Ulrike & Eisenbeiss, Sonja; published in 'Brain and Language' 90, 423-433

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature... more This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay when an inflected form contained positive feature specifications for grammatical features that did not match the feature specifications of the grammatical context in which it
appeared. No delay, however, occurred when an incorrectly inflected form had mismatching negative specifications, whereas its positively specified features matched the respective positive features of the context. This result provides evidence for a different status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features. It supports the idea of radical underspecification according to which only positive feature specifications are part of the representations of morphologically complex forms or affixes, whereas negative
feature specifications are assigned on the basis of paradigmatic contrasts.