Case Syncretism Research Articles

Morphological interpretations of syncretism in the panorama of Greek

Abstract This paper explores the nuanced realm of case syncretism, focusing primarily on its synchronic presence in Modern Greek (dialectal variety) and on the diachronic emergence of the phenomenon, classifying the distribution of syncretic cells in the nominal inflectional system of the language. This analysis shows that syncretism has been extended over time to many nouns, no longer limited either to neuter nouns or to the cells for the Nominative and Accusative. I suggest that the distribution of syncretic cells in Greek is influenced primarily by grammatical gender, but it is also affected by the productivity of each inflectional class, which I attribute to the morphomic (in terms of Aronoff [1994]. Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes, vol. 22. MIT Press.) nature of the phenomenon. I propose a decisive new factor preventing a cell from participating in syncretic patterns: inter-paradigmatic similarity of affixes appears to block syncretism. Further, I examine the factors facilitating the development and expansion of syncretic patterns.

Motivating a Morphome Albanian Case Syncretism as a Case Study

This paper discusses case syncretism patterns in Albanian, arguing for an underlyingly syntactic (i.e. functional) motivation for seemingly ʻmorphomicʼ (i.e. purely formal) metasyncretism patterns in its nominal inflection. It is argued that the distribution of syncretized and non-syncretized forms in the Albanian nominal paradigm is motivated by language economy in such a way that syncretism is used to produce an ʻoptimalʼ distribution of formally distinct case forms, so that the syncretized forms are always in complementary distribution w. r. t. their syntactic functions, and only the minimal necessary number of morphologically different forms remains in the paradigm. From a purely morphological point of view, this creates seemingly ʻmorphomicʼ patterns, in which, as a rule, syncretized forms do not form a natural class. However, these particular syncretism patterns are motivated in fact by the underlying functional ʻneedsʼ (or the lack thereof) of the nominal morphosyntax, so that the distribution of syncretized and non-syncretized forms in the Albanian nominal inflectional paradigm is, in fact, entirely motivated by the division of labour between case and definiteness in the syntax.

The Role of Case Syncretism in Agreement Attraction: A Comprehension Study.

Many production and comprehension experiments have studied attraction errors in agreement, primarily in number (e.g., “The key to the cabinets were rusty”). Studies on gender agreement attraction are still sparse, especially in comprehension. We present two self-paced reading experiments on Russian focusing on the role of syncretism in this phenomenon. Russian nouns are inflected for case and number, and some forms have the same inflections (are syncretic). In several experiments on Slovak, it was shown that both head and attractor syncretism play a role for gender agreement in production. We demonstrate for the first time that this is also the case in comprehension. The role of head noun syncretism has not been analyzed in any previous comprehension studies, also for number agreement. We conclude that syncretic forms create uncertainty, which is crucial for agreement disruption. These results are better compatible with retrieval approaches to agreement attraction. We discuss the implications of our findings for the nature of the retrieval cues used to establish morphosyntactic dependencies. The question whether case marking modulates agreement attraction in comprehension has also been addressed in a study on Armenian, and it found no evidence of such influence. We offer an explanation of the conflicting findings from several studies based on the syntactic constructions they used as materials.

Two representations of case: Evidence from numerals and relatives

This paper highlights a fundamental tension between the representations required for case syncretism versus the representations required for case priority. Case syncretism is captured with a feature decomposition based on the patterns established in Caha 2009. However, a different decomposition is required for case priority relations, which are instantiated in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) numeral constructions and in BCS and German relative constructions. The paper proposes that this conflict can be resolved by introducing two levels of representation into the case system: priority is determined by set structures in the syntax, while syncretism is analyzed following a post-syntactic unification operation.

Оценка языковой способности нейронных моделей на материале предикативного согласования в русском языке

This study investigates the linguistic competence of modern language models. Artificial neural networks demonstrate high quality in many natural language processing tasks. However, their implicit grammar knowledge remains unstudied. The ability to judge a sentence as grammatical or ungrammatical is regarded as key property of human’s linguistic competence. We suppose that language models’ grammar knowledge also occurs in their ability to judge the grammaticality of a sentence. In order to test neural networks’ linguistic competence, we probe their acquisition of number predicate agreement in Russian. A dataset consisted of artificially generated grammatical and ungrammatical sentences was created to train the language models. Automatic sentence generation allows us to test the acquisition of particular language phenomenon, to detach from vocabulary and pragmatic differences. We use transfer learning of pre-trained neural networks. The results show that all the considered models demonstrate high accuracy and Matthew's correlation coefficient values which can be attributed to successful acquisition of predicate agreement rules. The classification quality is reduced for sentences with inanimate nouns which show nominative-accusative case syncretism. The complexity of the syntactic structure turns out to be significant for Russian models and a model for Slavic languages, but it does not affect the errors distribution of multilingual models.

Падежный синкретизм в истории славянских парадигм

Case syncretism in the history of Slavic paradigms. The article is devotedto the problem of case syncretism. Specific definitions of this concept and theclassification of its types from different periods of linguistic research are given.Further on, the issues of case syncretism are discussed, with special attentionpaid to its manifestation and regularities in the Slavic languages. The mostcommon cases of syncretism in modern literary languages are presented andcompared to the situation of the Common Slavic period. The problems ofcertain historical aspects of the formal concurrency of case endings and theirpossible causes are touched upon. The article concludes with a brief review ofthe theoretical explanations of syncretism and stresses the applicability ofnatural morphology to solve the questions posed.

Implicational generalizations in morphological syncretism: The role of communicative biases

Cross-linguistic generalizations about grammatical contexts favoring syncretism often have an implicational form. This paper shows that this is expected if (i) morphological paradigms are required to be both as small and as unambiguous as possible, (ii) languages may prioritize these requirements differently, and (iii) probability distributions for grammatical features interacting in syncretic patterns are fixed across languages. More specifically, this approach predicts that grammatical contexts that are less probable or more informative about a target grammatical feature $ T $ should favor syncretism of $ T $ cross-linguistically. The paper provides evidence for these predictions based on four detailed case studies involving well-known patterns of contextual syncretism (gender syncretism based on number, gender syncretism based on person, aspect syncretism based on tense, and case syncretism based on animacy).

Partially ordered case hierarchies

I argue that patterns of case syncretism across languages can be modelled by partially, rather than totally, ordered case hierarchies. Partially ordered case hierarchies avoid the need for postulating multiple instances of the same case while retaining case contiguity in the representation of case syncretism. I discuss data from three languages in which differential object marking is syncretic with dative and show that partially ordered hierarchies capture these and other patterns of syncretism in line with some of the conclusions reached by Harðarson (2016) and Zompì (2019) about cross-linguistic patterns of case syncretism.

The Development of the Russian u + GEN in the Ablative and Locative Directions

ABSTRACT This paper explores the functions of the prepositional phrase consisting of the preposition u ‘at’ and the genitive with human referent (henceforth indicated as u + GEN) in the history of Russian. In Modern Russian, u + GEN encodes predicative possession, external possessor and the human non-recipient third argument of the verb of ‘removing’, ‘buying’ and ‘asking/requesting’. Based on the analysis of the Primary Chronicle and the Old East Slavic and the Middle Russian Subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus, the present research aims to demonstrate that the roles of u + GEN should be considered within the Ablative-Locative spread in which u + GEN superseded the locative role and at the same time retained the ablative role. According to the Corpora, u + GEN was already used as a human non-recipient 3rd argument of the mentioned three groups of verbs in Old East Slavic and the entrenchment of this encoding was prominent in Middle Russian. I assume that u + GEN retained its ablative function due to a language-internal drift in the development of the possessive function of the u + GEN and to the influence of language contacts, in which bilingual North Finnic speakers transferred the locative-ablative case syncretism of their mother tongue to Old East Slavic and Middle Russian.

Старочувашский памятник с различением датива и аккузатива

This paper introduces the linguistic evidence extracted from the first translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Chuvash, which was published in Kazan in 1820. On the basis of a detailed analysis of dialect-specific features, and especially phonological and morphological innovations, the attested variety should be classified among the Kărmăš—Xĕrlĕ Čutay varieties of Viryal Chuvash. Such a conclusion is consistent with the available extra-linguistic evidence regarding the dialect affiliation of this early Bible translation. Many of the archaic features found in the first translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Chuvash were previously documented in other preStandard Chuvash texts from the 18th—19th centuries. One salient feature that distinguishes the Gospel translation from the other contemporary sources is that the attested variety retains the old distinction between the dative and accusative case markers (after a limited number of lexical and grammatical morphemes). Modern Chuvash makes use of the syncretic dative-accusative case suffix -(n)A, dial. -(j)A, which developed through the merger of reflexes of Proto-Turkic dative and accusative case markers, owing to phonological and paradigmatic factors. The loss of the dative-accusative distinction is usually considered an early phenomenon in the history of Chuvash because there is no trace of such a distinction in the modern Chuvash dialects. However, the fact that at least one of the Viryal Chuvash varieties featured the dative-accusative distinction as late as the 19th century provides evidence for a recent origin of the case syncretism in Chuvash. This makes the first translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Chuvash a key source on the development of the Chuvash case system prior to the emergence of the dative-accusative syncretism.

Alinhamento morfossintático em Matis (Pano)

Este artigo descreve o alinhamento morfossintático em matis, língua da família Pano, falada na terra indígena Vale do Javari, região oeste do estado do Amazonas, Brasil. Estudos sobre essa língua têm sido realizados desde o início do século XXI, com análises do alinhamento morfossintático restritas a aspectos morfológicos da oração. Baseado nos resultados desses estudos e na descrição de dados primários da língua matis, o presente trabalho propõe a descrição sistematizada do alinhamento morfossintático, por meio da análise funcional e textual da marcação de caso. A abordagem teórico-metodológica tem como base os princípios da Linguística Tipológica Funcional, com a análise realizada por meio da descrição de dados obtidos em sessões de elicitação e extraídos de narrativas coletadas em trabalho de campo. Os resultados da análise morfológica indicam a relação de categorias nominais entre o alinhamento morfossintático e a ergatividade no sincretismo de casos. Na análise sintática, o sistema funcional do alinhamento morfossintático define a interação gramatical da ergatividade sintática e a concordância de participante. Espera-se que os resultados e conclusões apresentados neste artigo contribuam na compreensão dos sistemas de transitividade da língua matis, como a concordância de participante e o alinhamento morfossintático.

From Bidialectal to Bilingual

The present work examines nominal case marking in Wisconsin Heritage German, based on audio recordings of six speakers made in the late 1940s. Linguistic data provide positive evidence for a four-case nominal system characteristic of Standard German. At the same time, biographical and demographic information show that the heritage varieties acquired and spoken in the home often employed a different nominal system, one that often exhibited dative-accusative case syncretism and lacked genitive case—features that surfaced even when Standard German was spoken. These data strongly suggest that speakers were proficient in both their heritage variety of German, acquired through naturalistic means, as well as in Standard German, acquired through institutional support in educational and religious domains. Over time, these formal German-language domains shifted to externally oriented, English-language institutions. Standard German was no longer supported, while the heritage variety was retained in domestic and social domains. Subsequent case syncretism in Wisconsin Heritage German therefore reflects the retention of preimmigration, nonstandard varieties, rather than a morphological change in a unified heritage grammar. This work concludes by proposing a multistage model of domain-specific language shift, informed by both synchronic variation within the community as well as by social factors affecting language shift over time.

Case Syncretism, Animacy, and Word Order in Continental West Germanic: Neurolinguistic Evidence from a Comparative Study on Standard German, Zurich German, and Fering (North Frisian)

To understand a sentence, it is crucial to understand who is doing what. The interplay of morphological case marking, argument serialization, and animacy provides linguistic cues for the processing system to rapidly identify the thematic roles of the arguments. The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates on-line brain responses during argument identification in Zurich German, a High Alemannic dialect, and in Fering, a North Frisian variety, which both exhibit reduced case systems as compared to Standard German. Like Standard German, Zurich German and Fering are Continental West Germanic varieties, and indeed argument processing in sentences with an object-before-subject order engenders a qualitatively similar ERP pattern of a scrambling negativity followed by a P600 in all tested varieties. However, the P600 component—a late positive ERP response, which has been linked to the categorization of task-relevant stimuli—is selectively affected by the most prominent cue for argument identification in each variety, which is case marking in Standard German, but animacy in Zurich German and Fering. Thus, even closely related varieties may employ different processing strategies based on the language-specific availability of syntactic and semantic cues for argument identification.*

Monotonicity as an effective theory of morphosyntactic variation

One of the major goals of linguistics is to delineate the possible range of variation across languages. Recent work has identified a surprising number of typological gaps in a variety domains. In morphology, this includes stem suppletion, person pronoun syncretism, case syncretism, and noun stem allomorphy. In morphosyntax, only a small number of all conceivable Person Case Constraints and Gender Case Constraints are found. While various proposals have been put forward for each individual domain, few attempts have been made to give a unified explanation of the limited typology across all domains. This paper presents a novel account that deliberately abstracts away from the usual details of grammatical description in order to provide a domain-agnostic explanation of the limits of typological variation. This is achieved by combining prominence hierarchies, e.g. for person and case, with mappings from those hierarchies to the relevant output forms. As the mappings are required to be monotonic, only a fraction of all conceivable patterns can be instantiated.

Ergative is not inherent: Evidence from *ABA in suppletion and syncretism

I show that case syncretism obeys the same *ABA restriction previously observed in case-sensitive suppletion: no Vocabulary-Insertion rule can apply to both an inherent case and an unmarked core case (nominative/absolutive) without also applying to another core case (accusative/ergative). The case hierarchy that these effects motivate is one where the ergative is consistently put in the same box as the accusative, separately from all inherent cases. This offers a new kind of argument in favor of dependent-case theories, whereby accusative and ergative are both structurallyassigned to nominals that stand in an asymmetric c-command relation to another as-yet-caseless nominal nearby.

Structural Properties of Nouns in Western Tamang

Western Tamang (WT), a major dialect of Tamang, exhibits typologically interesting structural properties in the domain of nouns in contrast to Eastern Tamang (ET). Like in ET, the common nouns in WT are marked for gender, number, classifier and relational functions by specific markers. Unlike Himalayish languages and like ET and other Bodish languages, WT does not exhibit agreement between the subject and the verb in terms of gender and number. However, WT differs from ET, especially, in the domains of number, case markings and case syncretism.

Dative and genitive case interchange in Greek papyri from Roman-Byzantine Egypt

Abstract Examples of case interchange in Greek papyri are often used to illustrate the start of dative case syncretism in Greek (Humbert 1930; Browning 1983; Horrocks 2010). On the other hand, case interchange can be caused by Egyptian scribes having difficulties with the Greek case system (Clarysse 1993; Vierros 2012). In this article, I combine quantitative analysis of the dative and genitive case interchanges in Greek documentary papyri with a qualitative examination of the social and linguistic contexts of the interchanges. This shows that whereas the usage of the dative instead of the genitive pronoun as adnominal possessor may be explained by indirect bilingual interference and scribal confusion, the replacement of the dative by the genitive as a third argument of a verb may have been caused by interference from the Greek spoken language in the writing of less educated scribes.

Dative Alternation and Dative Case Syncretism in Greek: The Use of Dative, Accusative and Prepositional Phrases in Documentary Papyri

AbstractThis paper explores the evidence for dative case syncretism with personal pronouns in post‐Classical Greek based on documentary papyri (300BCE–800CE). Three alternative encodings are examined for the animate goal of transfer verbs: the prepositions prós and eis (with accusative) and the bare accusative case. It is shown that the dative case and the preposition prós are in complementary distribution dependent on the animacy of the object and the conceptualization of the event. The preposition eis is only used for animate goals in the specialized meaning ‘on account of’. The bare accusative case is occasionally found as a replacement for the dative case, but not in the same constructions as those in which the prepositions are attested. Therefore, based on the encoding of the animate goal in Greek papyrus letters, there is no reason to assume that a change in the use of these prepositions led to the merger of dative and accusative cases.

Agreement under Case Matching in Polish co and który Relative Clauses Headed by Numerically Quantified Nouns*

This paper aims to describe subject-verb agreement patterns within Polish co and ktory relative clauses in which the relativized subject head noun (virile and nonvirile) modified by a higher numeral is assigned genitive case. Such subjects in Polish obligatorily induce default 3sg. neut. agreement on the main-clause verbal predicate. However, when the same subject is relativized while also being the relative-clause subject, various agreement options may occur depending on the type of relative marker as well as the grammatical gender of the head noun. In order to examine these agreement possibilities, a survey was conducted measuring Polish native speakers’ acceptability judgments. These patterns suggest that both co and ktory relatives could be derived via a matching analysis because they both allow optionality of agreement in certain environments. Furthermore, this optionality can be accounted for in terms of Case attraction and syncretism of case found in the paradigms of higher numerals and the relative pronoun ktory.

Unlocking the Ik instrumental case

Ik, a Kuliak (Nilo-Saharan) language spoken by roughly 7000 people in northeastern Uganda, has up to now been described as having a case system with seven cases (König 2002, 2008). However, evidence from morphophonological variations on case suffixes requires that an eighth case be posited. Based on the semantic roles the eighth case marker encodes, it can be called the ‘instrumental’ case. The present paper provides a brief description of this so-named instrumental case in Ik. It does so by first giving an overview of the allomorphy of all eight case suffixes to provide some analytic context for distinguishing the instrumental from other case markers, particularly the ablative. Then it gives examples of the six semantic case roles that the instrumental case suffix encodes. By introducing an eighth case, the paper shows that a supposed instance of case syncretism (between the ablative and the instrumental) should no longer be thought to obtain in this East African language.