Accusative Marking Research Articles

Nominative objects in Korean

AbstractThis article addresses the hitherto neglected topic of the Korean Nominative Object Construction (NOC) within the Cognitive Grammar (CG) framework. In the NOC, schematically illustrated as [N-NOM N-NOM PSYCH-PRED], the second NP behaves like a direct object. While the construction has puzzled many researchers in different languages, and a sizable amount of research exists, relatively little attention has been paid to Korean. It is worth noting that the findings made in the extant generative-linguistic research – including the research on Japanese, which exhibits significant typological similarities to Korean – are not sufficient to account for the Korean data. After identifying the properties of the Korean NOC, we demonstrate that the NOC merely reflects how the experiencer conceptualizes the stimulus that exists in a certain domain of mental experience within her mind. This internal representation of the stimulus is marked nominative by being the sole participant in the relationship profiled by the psychological verb at the lower level of organization. At the higher level of organization, the first nominal is the primary participant as an experiencer, thereby receiving nominative case as well. Our analysis is extended to the desiderative construction, which exhibits similar patterns to the PSYCH-PRED NOC but allows alternation of case in the second nominal between nominative and accusative marking. The case alternation is motivated by two different types of construals of the same conceptual base. The nominative marking arises when the embedded transitive relationship is backgrounded, whereas the accusative marking becomes available when the profile is given to the transitive relationship. We demonstrate that the source of the case alternation lies in the profile, rejecting the dichotomous division of the construction based on its mono- or bi-clausal properties.

Expanding the dative semantic map: the functions of the postposition=rāin the Tātic language group

AbstractIn Tātic, a modern Northwest Iranian language group,=rāis a polysemous postposition which has not evolved into an accusative marker, unlike what happened in Modern Persian. Tātic varieties, which include all Tāti, Tālyshi and Tātoid dialects spoken in northwest Iran, exploit the postposition=rāto mark many different case roles. This paper studies the various functions of the postposition=rāand its variants in this language group. The data for the study have been gathered through fieldwork and interviews with Tāti native speakers as well as through available descriptive grammars. Using the dative semantic-map approach, we show that the main functions that=rāmarks in all Tātic dialects are ‘beneficiary’, ‘reason’ and ‘purpose’. We conclude that because some of the functions of=rāare not among the semantic roles in the conventional dative semantic map, this needs to be expanded in order to account for the polysemy patterns of=rāin the Tātic language group.

Beyond affectedness – partitive objects and degrees of agenthood in Ancient Greek

Abstract In several ancient and modern Indo-European languages, the partitive-genitive may be used in place of the accusative to encode the second argument of two-place verbs. In Ancient Greek the two types of object encoding can alternate with change-of-state verbs, alternation being viewed as connected with degrees of patient affectedness: the partitive-genitive encodes partially affected objects. Alternation also extends to experiential verbs, which are typically characterized by a low degree of transitivity and do not imply any change of state of the object-stimulus. Rather than concentrating on the implications of case alternation on the construal of the object, I consider the effects of variation on the whole construction, and argue that genitive vs. accusative marking of the object (NomGen vs. NomAcc constructions) reflects the construal of the subject-experiencer. While the different construal of the experiencer in terms of degrees of control cross-linguistically often results in non-nominative encoding of the experiencer, in Ancient Greek it is object encoding that affects the construal of the experiencer and reflects a scale based on possible control. The distribution of constructions with experiential verbs shows that NomAcc is typical of verbs of sight, thought, intellectual knowledge and emotions connected to sight and awareness, such as wonder and fear. NomGen is connected with touch, smell, taste, memory, forgetfulness, care and desire. In the in-between area, verbs of hearing, learning and verbs of affection may feature both accusative and genitive encoding, thus constituting a fuzzy transition area. The connection between sight and other experiential verbs that feature accusative encoding reflects an embodied conceptualization of experiential situations.

Синтагматический подход к дифференцированному маркированию прямого дополнения в тувинском и хакасском языках

This paper presents a comparative study of differential object marking in the Tuvan and Khakass languages in terms of the syntagmatic approach for determining syntagmatic factors suitable for highlighting morpho-syntactic direct object marking. With the standard arrangement of the components of the sentence structure in the Tuvan and Khakass languages, there is no need for explicit marking of the syntagmatic relations between the direct object and the predicate due to their syntactic, semantic, and communicative unity resulting from the evident syntactic relations between the components of the verbal syntagma. The direct object, located immediately before the predicate, can be part of the topic, thus receiving accusative marking. The thematization of the direct complement “distances” it from the group of the predicate that is usually rhematized. Therefore, the loss of communicative unity causes the need to mark the syntagmatic relations of the object and predicate. With the predicate preceded by the rhematized member of the sentence, the direct object receives accusative marking. Given a high degree of similarity of the word order in the Tuvan and Khakass languages, there are differences in the number of possible arrangements of the linear structure components: in the Khakass language, the word order is more free, with the general Turkic principle of placing only topicalized components of a sentence in the postproposal position being observed. However, there are cases falling outside of this theory, involving the paradigmatic relationship of the direct object with other members of the sentence, suggesting the need for a paradigmatic-syntagmatic approach to considering the differentiated marking of the direct object.

NORTHERN KHANTY AS A LANGUAGE WITH THE FEATURES OF ACCUSATIVE AND HIERARCHICAL ALIGNMENT

This study features an alignment system in Kazym Khanty. Several facts including accusative marking of personal pronouns, verbal agreement with S/A and a strong tendency towards the clause-initial position of S/A suggest treating Kazym Khanty alignment as accusative. Meanwhile field and text data on the distribution of the active and passive voice as well as subject and subject-object agreement forms reveal several hierarchical coding effects. These include sensitivity of active/passive distinction to animacy and referentiality of the core participants and definiteness requirement of both participants for subject-object agreement. In sum, these facts suggest that Kazym Khanty can be considered an intermediate case of an alignment system combining certain surface properties of an accusative alignment with underlying hierarchical distribution patterns resembling some hierarchical coding systems of Algonquian and TibetoBurman languages.

Вариативное падежное маркирование посессивных именных групп в позиции прямого дополнения в тувинском языке

Considering the phenomenon of differential object marking of the direct object in possessive nominal phrases (NPs) has revealed two varieties of differential case marking in the Tuvan language: of the direct object and of the possessor. Thus, it was interesting to check the correlation between the factors influencing variation in both cases. The choice in favor of the genitive marking of the possessor is found to be determined by definiteness, animacy of the referent of some NPs, the linear remoteness of the possessive construction components, and additional definitions. Genitive marking of a possessor with an indefinite or non-referential status is due to the sentence information structure. The same set of factors is relevant for choosing accusative direct object labeling. Thus, the obligatory accusative marking of possessive NPs with a genitive possessor in the position of a direct object is associated with the same factors in the structure of relations between components that determined the choice of the genitive form of the possessor. Accusative marking of the direct object of possessive NPs without a genitive is determined by the definiteness of the possessor, the presence of identifying definitions, the presupposition of the singularity of the referent, the sentence information structure, with different communicative status of the object and the predicate. Possessive NPs without a genitive in the direct object position are used in the nominative: if their referent has an indefinite or non-referential status, they are in the utterance rheme with a contact arrange-ment to the control verb and have no other determinants.

Accusative Licensing of Nouns in Turkish

The observation that some Turkish nouns license accusative marking of their complements has puzzled linguistics for the last three decades. The first and the most common hypothesis is that such nouns are part of light-verb compounds in their infinitive nominal form where the verbal part is dropped. In this paper, I argue that light-verb hypothesis is incorrect by providing several constructions where it fails to account for. I propose an alternative, two-part hypothesis. The first part is independent of the light-verb constructions and claims that in Turkish, the accusative case is licensed by verb stems rather than finite verbs. This is a natural corollary of a yet larger hypothesis about the structure of syntax trees for languages like Turkish which claims that the syntax trees go deeper than the word level. The leaves of such trees are morphemes or morpheme groups and the whole of infection/derivation is considered within a single morphosyntactic structure. The implication is that as far as the case-licensing is concerned, only the verb stems license accusative case. In constructions where a deverbal noun seems to be licensing accusative case, it is actually the verb stem in the noun’s derivation tree that licenses the accusative case. The second part of the hypothesis is the claim that the case-licensing nouns are actually lexicalizations involving multiple adjacent leaves in the morphosyntactic tree. The most common manifestations of this are the lexicalizations of verb stem-participle pairs through replacement with templatic surface forms borrowed from Arabic. The new proposal naturally explains the observation that accusative licensing is most common for a small set of words borrowed from Arabic. I illustrate that these words are the templatic forms of their multi-morpheme counterparts in Turkish which correspond to deverbal nouns, adjectives or adverbs.

Ditransitive Construction in English, Hungarian, Turkish, and Indonesian Language

Abstract: Every language shows a different way of expressing ditransitive construction. Thus, the present study aims to investigate and compare the important elements exhibit in the languages under discussion in constructing ditransitive sentences. This paper is a qualitative study. The data comes from detailed written grammar texts, corpora, and interviews with native language speakers. The results show that the languages play with the word order to weigh the focus of sentences. English and Indonesian language do not apply any case-marking to mark the function of the noun phrase. However, in the basic prototypical ditransitive construction, Hungarian and Turkish languages apply an accusative marker to mark the theme and a dative marker to mark the recipient. On the other hand, the verbs’ affixation also affects the semantic property of the ditransitive verbs in the Indonesian language. It is also revealed that the languages use the same ditransitive construction to express genuine transfer and beneficial transfer.Keywords: ditransitive construction, cognitive grammar, comparative study.

Emergence of the discourse marker sonojitsu ‘in fact’ in Japanese

This study investigates the development of the hybrid noun phrase sonojitsu (‘that fact, its fact’) to a discourse marker (DM) ‘in fact, in reality, as a matter of fact’ in the history of Japanese. We examined the history of sonojitsu, drawing on various corpora, databases, and dictionaries. The findings are summarised as follows: (1) sonojitsu was sporadically used as a noun phrase mainly attached to an accusative marker or a topic marker until the early 18th century; (2) the zero-marked sonojitsu began to be used as a DM of adversativity from the early 18th century; (3) throughout its history, the DM sonojitsu typically occurs in sentence-medial and clause-initial position, serving an adversative relationship between two clauses; (4) throughout its history, the DM sonojitsu is often used redundantly with a preceding expression of adversativity.

Typological Shift in Bilinguals’ L1: Word Order and Case Marking in Two Varieties of Child Quechua

We compare speech production and find morphosyntactic change among children and adolescents speaking two closely related varieties of Quechua in Cuzco, Peru, and Chuquisaca, Bolivia. Quechua languages traditionally employ Object-Verb (OV) word order in main clauses, but robust case marking permits other orders, especially to focalize new information through constituent fronting. In Chuquisaca, but not Cuzco, we find that schoolchildren often omit the accusative suffix -ta from direct objects while retaining a prosodic trace of -ta. In other varieties, loss of accusative marking is associated with a shift towards Verb-Object (VO) word order, as in Spanish. However, we find that Chuquisaqueños use more canonical OV and possessor-possessed order in declarative sentences than do Cuzqueños, who employ a wide range of word orders at the sentence level and deviate from the possessor-possessed norm for Quechua noun phrases. Our finding of more rigid word order in Chuquisaca highlights the complex factors contributing to typological shift in word order and morphology: Omission of case morphology places a greater burden on word order to identify grammatical roles. Further, we find that Chuquisaqueño schoolchildren alone have begun to use huk, “one,” to mark indefiniteness, perhaps to replace determiner-like functions ascribed to -ta and to obsolescent markers such as evidentials.

Cross-linguistic patterns of morpheme order reflect cognitive biases: An experimental study of case and number morphology

A foundational goal of linguistics is to investigate whether shared features of the human cognitive system can explain how linguistic patterns are distributed across languages. In this paper we report a series of artificial language learning experiments which aim to test a hypothesised link between cognition and a persistent regularity of morpheme order: number morphemes (e.g., plural markers) tend to be ordered closer to noun stems than case morphemes (e.g., accusative markers) (Universal 39; Greenberg, 1963). We argue that this typological tendency may be driven by learners’ bias towards orders that reflect scopal relationships in morphosyntactic and semantic composition (Bybee, 1985; Rice, 2000; Culbertson & Adger, 2014). This bias is borne out by our experimental results: learners—in the absence of any evidence on how to order number and case morphology—consistently produce number closer to the noun stem. We replicate this effect across two populations (English and Japanese speakers). We also find that it holds independent of morpheme position (prefixal or suffixal), degree of boundedness (free or bound morphology), frequency, and which particular case/number feature values are instantiated in the overt markers (accusative or nominative, plural or singulative). However, we show that this tendency can be reversed when the form of the case marker is made highly dependent on the noun stem, suggesting an influence of an additional bias for local dependencies. Our results provide evidence that universal features of cognition may play a causal role in shaping the relative order of morphemes.

La distribuzione diatopica di alcuni predicati complessi sardi

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to examine the diatopic variation of some Sardinian complex predicates, mainly from a morphosyntactic (and, secondarily, a semantic) perspective. I will discuss (i) the distribution of Camp(idanese)ai/ Log(udorese)-Nu(orese)àere a+ inf(initive), lit. ‘to have to’ + inf., and of the agglutinated and univerbated forms of Log.-Nu.dèvere/dèppere+ inf., lit. ‘must’ + inf., both constructions expressing (different types of) future time reference; (ii) the diffusion of person and number in the modal complex predicate Camp.fai/ Log.-Nu.fàghere/fàchere a+ inf., lit. ‘to do to’ + inf., with the sense of ‘being able/allowed to do something’; (iii) cases of double accusative marking of clitic pronouns expressingcausee/beneficiaryandundergoer, and agreement between these pronouns and the past participle of ‘make’/‘let’ in the causative constructions Camp.fai/ Log.-Nu.fàghere/fàchere+ inf., lit. ‘to make’ + inf., and Camp.lassai/ Log.-Nu.lassare/(dassare)+ inf., lit. ‘to let’ + inf.; (iv) the ongoing diffusion of the reiterative and/or purposive values of Camp.torrai a/po/ Log.-Nu.torrare a/pro+ inf., lit. ‘to return to’ + inf.; (v) the ongoing diffusion of the aspectual complex predicate Camp.(am)megai/ Log.-Nu.(am)megare de/a+ inf., conveying progressive aspect, according to Blasco Ferrer (1991; 2002) and my data. In conclusion, I will argue that isoglosses of morphosyntactic variation of Sardinian complex predicates seem to be more ‘conservative’ (in the sense of Virdis 1988) and to englobe wider and more homogenous areas, if compared to phonological isoglosses.

Linguistic manifestations of fictive change participants

Abstract This paper presents a discourse-pragmatic analysis of event conceptions with an accusative-, dative-, and comitative-marked participant and thereby accounts for somewhat irregular accusative marking in Korean and Japanese. The three cases can basically be analyzed as serving to mark participants in physical or mental events that involve a factive or fictive change as a primary element. The accusative marks a change-constitutive participant (so-called affected or effected entity), while the dative and comitative mark a change-independent participant. Unlike Japanese, Korean exhibits the tendency to extend the accusative case to the marking of an entity that constitutes some fictive change in a discourse-based event conception. In contrast, Japanese is liable to recruit the accusative case in an extended use for the marking of an entity that undergoes a fictive change in the conceptions of mental/bodily experiences. These conceptual characterizations can provide a further explanation for the discrepant and idiosyncratic accusative marking in verb phrases such as ‘ride a bus,’ ‘meet a person,’ ‘come/go to a place,’ and ‘give a person a book.’

Neutralizing Free Choice Items via Maximal Domain Restriction: Farsi -i Indefinites

This paper identifies two types of free choice items (FCIs) in Farsi: yek-i DPs and har -i DPs. Their distribution and interpretation pose a puzzle: yek -i DPs pattern with other existential FCIs, and har -i DPs with other universal FCIs, but both items lose their prototypical FCI behavior when they combine with the accusative marker -ro. The paper shows that the loss of FCI behavior follows from an alternative-based analysis of FCIs (Chierchia 2013) under some assumptions about the semantic effect of -ro. The analysis parallels the explanation for the loss of FCI status of Spanish algunos presented in Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito 2011 in that it also relies on the derivation of alternatives that are equivalent to the assertion, hence not excludable.

Differential Object Marking and the properties of D in the dialects of the extreme south of Italy

This paper discusses two case studies of microvariation in accusative marking in the Italo-Romance varieties of the extreme south of Italy. In particular, the diatopic variation displayed by the dialects of southern Calabria gives rise to peculiar patterns of alternation between presence or absence of the marker a ‘to’ in flagging the accusative. The realisation of accusative case is partially governed by semantic and referential features, i.e. specificity and animacy. In addition, the nature of the realisation of the D head results in a degree of competition between zero marking and analytic accusative marking with a. Given the century-long co-existence of Latin/Romance and Greek in southern Calabria, the relevant morphosyntactic patterns in Case-marking will also be examined from a language contact perspective. We will highlight how the relevant outcomes do not simply involve borrowing mechanisms or template copying from the lending variety but, rather, produce hybrid structures no longer ascribable to a purely Romance or Greek grammar.

PERAN SEMANTIS DALAM KONSTRUKSI DATIF BAHASA JEPANG

This study aims to describe the verbs that give rise to dative construction and the semantic roles that arise in dative construction in Japanese sentence structure, which includes the agentif role, benefactive role, experience role, and objective role. The theory used in this study is the theory of Givon (2001), Cook's Case Grammar Theory (1979), and the theory of inheritance from Nitta (1991). Data sources are taken from the Japanese corpus, www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/
 This research shows Japanese language is a language marked or a file. The case in Japanese here is closely related to the system of inheritance in the Japanese sentence structure. The marker is attached after noun (noun). The markers or particles that state direct objects are accusative markers 'o' and markers datif 'ni' as markers of indirect objects. The verb found in this study is tatakareta 'has been tapped', yonde kureta 'has read', tooraseta 'has (caused) passed', and oboeta 'has remembered' which can bring up multiple objects, namely the order of direct objects and indirect objects. The results of this study, (1) show the verbs that allow the emergence of multiple objects, especially indirect objects (IO) in the construction of Japanese, are transitive verbs or action verbs and intransitive verbs in the form of idou doushi 'moving verbs' are causative in Japanese language {~ exciting / ~ saseru} means to make / cause, and (2) the semantic roles that arise in the dative construction of Japanese sentence structures (BJ) include (a) agentive roles, (b) benefactive roles, (c) experience roles, and (c) objective roles. Semantically the verbs that give rise to the semantic role are keizoku doushi 'continuous verbs' and shunkan doushi 'pungtual verbs'.

조사 ‘을’의 부가와 타동성

조사 ‘을’의 부가와 타동성

Case marking in German-speaking children with specific language impairment and with phonological impairment

ABSTRACT Identification of children with specific language impairment (SLI, now known as Developmental Language Disorder) remains challenging. Morphosyntax difficulties have been proposed as potential linguistic ‘markers’ for SLI across a number of languages. This study investigates the existence of such a clinical marker in German-speaking children with SLI, looking in particular at German case marking, and makes comparisons with matched typically developing groups and a group with isolated phonological impairment (PI). A case-control study was completed with 66 pre-school children in four groups (1) SLI, (2) PI, (3) age-matched typically developing children (TD-A) (4) language-matched typically developing children (TD-L). Errors in nominative, accusative and dative marking were analysed from the production of articles in elicitation tasks and spontaneous language samples. The performance of the SLI group was poorer than the TD-A group across all three grammatical cases investigated, but there was little supportive evidence for this being a diagnostic marker. It is, however, suggested that poor case marking may alert clinicians to the need for further linguistic assessment. No significant differences were found between the SLI and PI groups; rather scores for the PI group suggested they fell on a gradient between the SLI TD-A groups. Findings are discussed in relation to the proposed new diagnostic category of developmental language disorder.

Processing of Active Sentences with Different Accusative Markers /ta/ Accusatives vs. /va/ Accusatives in Spoken Sinhala language

This paper examines whether active sentences with different accusative markers illustrate identical circumstances when processing canonical ordered sentences and scramble ordered sentences. Specifically, this study focuses on Double Object Markers (DOM) phenomenon in Sinhala language with relation to sentence processing. Sinhala language is said to possess DOM for active sentences consisting of transitive verbs (/ta/ and /va/). Previous studies in experimental linguistics in Sinhala language have examined the canonical word order in active sentences consisting of transitive verbs with /ta/ accusatives, and have provided evidence that the canonical word order is decided based on the information provided by grammatical functions (Subject-Object-Verb). Since /va/ and /ta/ accusatives accompany different verbs, it is important to examine the sentences with /va/ accusatives in order to ascertain the fact that the canonical word order is constructed according to the grammatical information (i.e., Subject-Object-Verb) in all active sentences consisting of transitive verbs in the spoken form of the Sinhala language. Thus, this study conducted two experiments (EX#1 with /va/ accusatives, and EX#2 with /ta/ accusatives) using the nature of scrambling effects to seek whether SOV word order remains canonical and grammatical functions still provide necessary information to determine the canonical word order. A series of one-way ANOVAs was conducted on reaction times and error rates of the responses. The results show that the canonical order remains Subject-Object-Verb for active sentences consisting of transitive verbs with /va/ accusatives which in turn suggest that the information of grammatical function is still applicable regardless of different accusative types in active sentences of the Sinhala language.Key words - /ta/ Accusatives, /va/ Accusatives, Scrambling effects, Canonical order, Scrambled order

The nominative/accusative alternation in Japanese and information structure

In Japanese, desiderative (and potential) predicates derived from transitive verbs allow their direct object to be marked with the nominative marker ga, instead of the expected accusative marker o. This article argues that the nominative/accusative alternation in a desiderative construction has an information-structural implication. Nominative-marking on the object indicates its focushood, i.e., that it is either the focus of the utterance or part thereof, whereas accusative-marking has no such information-structural bearing. This claim is motivated by the observation that the direct object of a desiderative predicate resists nominative-marking when it is not adjacent to the predicate (“adjacency effect”). Under our account, the adjacency effect can be regarded as a variety of the garden-path effect, stemming from the discrepancy between the default (expected) locus of the focus and the pragmatic information conveyed by nominative-marking. With three sets of experimental data (from two acceptability judgment experiments with written stimuli and one rating experiment with auditory stimuli), we demonstrate that (i) the adjacency effect is real, and (ii) it can be mitigated by prosodic or contextual cues signaling the focushood of the object. The second finding conforms well to our hypothesis that the adjacency effect is a processing-based phenomenon, rather than a reflection of a purely syntactic constraint.