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This paper deals with the distribution of the use of the accusative as an indirect object in two major dialect groups of Modern Greek, namely Northern Greek and Pontic Greek. The loss of the dative in Medieval Greek (c. 10th c. AD) resulted in the use of the genitive as an indirect object in the southern varieties and of the accusative in Northern Greek and Asia Minor Greek. As Standard Modern Greek employs the genitive, little attention has been paid to the distribution of the accusative, and our study was aimed to fill that gap by presenting data collected in Northern Greece from speakers of both dialect groups. According to our findings, the accusative is exclusively used in all syntactic domains inherited from the Ancient Greek dative in both dialect groups, but the two groups are kept apart in terms of the obligatoriness vs. optionality or lack of clitic doubling and availability vs. lack of "high" positions, e.g., for external possessors and ethical dative constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Grewendorf's well-known German binding data with the double-object verb zeigen 'show', where one object reflexively binds the other and which suggests that the direct object (DO) is generated higher than the indirect object (IO), this paper argues for the canonical surface order of IO > DO as base order. We highlight the exceptional status of Grewendorf's examples, build on scope facts as well as a quantitative acceptability rating study, and exploit the fact that zeigen can also be used as inherently reflexive with idiomatic meaning. Appealing to the base configuration of the pieces of idiomatic expressions and considering different Spell-Out possibilities of coreferential objects in German, we show that the case, number, and gender underspecification of the anaphor sich poses a previously unnoticed problem for derivational approaches to binding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the syntactic dimension of ditransitive verbs in terms of the universal theory of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). This theory is syntactic in nature, but it also covers the semantic as well as the pragmatic aspects of any linguistic phenomenon. It assumes a universal framework through which syntactic constructions can be analyzed. However, the morphological structure that each language enjoys renders the universal treatment more complicated and can question the universal nature of such a theory. In this paper, an attempt is made to check if the universal tenet of the theory is maintained over two typologically different languages: English and Arabic in respect of the way that double-object constructions (DOCs) are represented in the theory. A limitation is made to answer these questions: does the rich morphological nature of Arabic affect the universality of RRG in so far as Layered Structure of the Clause (LSC) is concerned? and; where and how does the information about tense is represented in both languages? The results show that this theory is indeed universal when it deals with a syntactic phenomenon like DOCs and that a separate projection is dedicated to represent some related information about the clause and this is concluded from the analysis of the selected data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution analyses the role French may have played as a model language in the development of the indirect passive (or recipient passive) in Middle English. It is based on diachronic corpus data showing that the construction appeared in Middle English predominantly with verbs borrowed from French and spread to native verbs only later. The fact that French did not have a recipient passive construction speaks against contact influence, whereas the data as well as the situation of close language contact between Old French and Middle English speak in favour of contact-induced change. The hypothesis of internal change will be contrasted with several explanations in a language contact scenario. The first one is syntactic and regards the type of dative case : English integrated the French structural dative into its native grammar, which so far only had an inherent dative. Passives with structural datives were prior to native constructions and may have triggered them. The transfer may have been facilitated by the reanalysis of certain bridge constructions (proclitics and clausal complements). The more conceptual second part discusses current psycholinguistic research in order to identify methods which help overcome the methodological deadlock that historical linguists are facing when they want to assess the validity of competing explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present evidence for the influence of semantics on the order of subject, object, and verb in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) sentences. While some have argued for a prevailing pattern of SVO in Libras, we find a strong tendency for this order in sentences that do not presuppose the existence of the verb's object, but not in sentences that do, which instead favor SOV. These findings are coherent with those of a recent study on gesture. We argue that the variable influence of the relevant predicates is particularly salient in sign languages, due to the iconic nature of the visual modality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the structure of relative clauses with an indirect object or adjunct gap in two Mundaka Basque varieties (Mundaka Basque I and Mundaka Basque II). In Mundaka Basque I, relativization of indirect objects and adjuncts is grammatical when the relative clause is in subject or direct object position, while in Mundaka Basque II this same syntactic configuration is ungrammatical. This variation is explained by a difference in the status of P. In Mundaka Basque I the P has unvalued φ-features, whereas in Mundaka Basque II the P has no unvalued φ-features. Evidence for this comes from PP extraction out of [-Q] embedded clauses: the intermediate v gets its φ-features valued by the P of the extracted phrase in Mundaka Basque I, while it does not in Mundaka Basque II. Additionally, this study shows that the Case matching effect is not a syntactic constraint but rather a morphological constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the principles of economy, scrambled orders require an interpretive license. Removal of such a license should result in canonical orders, that is, orders I hypothesize to be determined by a thematic hierarchy. It is traditionally assumed that the interpretive license for scrambling is provided by information-structural interpretations such as focus and background. However, either direct object-indirect object or indirect object-direct object order is possible in Russian all-focus constructions, complicating the choice of order analyzed as canonical. I argue that Russian scrambling can be licensed by a variety of interpretations, focus/background encoding being but one of them. When the construal of objects is neutralized on the basis of all of the relevant interpretations, the direct object-indirect object order surfaces, strongly suggesting that this is the canonical order of Russian objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of subjective and objective nouns and noun phrases in discourse using the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. It expands upon an earlier study, where I showed that subjective adjectival premodifiers are typically used with the indefinite article in corpus data (e. g. an interesting conclusion), and that further modification (e. g. a very interesting conclusion) results in an even higher likelihood of indefinite marking (Vartiainen 2013, Subjectivity, indefiniteness and semantic change. English Language and Linguistics 17(1). 157-179). In this paper, I focus on three research questions: (i) does the correlation between subjective meaning and indefinite marking also obtain when demonstrative and possessive determiners are included in the data, (ii) does the correlation depend on adjectival modification, or are subjective nouns also used more often in indefinite structures, (iii) are there qualitative differences (in terms of syntactic roles) between the use of indefinite subjective and objective NPs? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses three variable coding properties of Spanish objects: flagging ( a-marking vs. ø-marking), indexing (clitic doubling vs. no doubling), and clitic case form (accusative lo vs. dative le). These properties are essential for the formal identification of grammatical relations. They are triggered by similar parameters that partly overlap and partly show distinct distributions, yet they also challenge the boundaries between direct objects [DO] and indirect objects [IO] and raise the question whether the typological alignment of Spanish (di)transitive clauses is indirective or secundative. The study draws on quantitative and qualitative corpus data on formal, semantic, and discourse properties of core participants in Spanish clauses, relating these properties to the distribution of variable coding. It is concluded that a-marking, clitic doubling, and leísmo are less frequently employed than unmarked objects, no doubling, and accusative case for clitics, that Spanish DO and IO must be taken as extreme points of a more general Object syntactic function, and that, in general, all variable object coding follows an indirective alignment type. Consequently, animate and topical objects are considered as formally and functionally marked atypical objects both in monotransitive and ditransitive clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L’étude porte sur les compléments en à et de placés à l'initiale d'un énoncé comportant une inversion du sujet nominal. Elle vise à comprendre pourquoi ces compléments sont parfois détachés à l'aide d'une virgule. L'observation de corpus textuels conduit à considérer que la présence ou l'absence de virgule signale deux constructions distinctes: dans la perspective théorique des approches macro-syntaxiques de l’énoncé en termes de ‘noyau’ / ‘affixes’, le complément initial suivi d'une virgule est analysé comme un préfixe détaché co-indexé au terme (vide) de départ du noyau, alors que dans la construction sans virgule le complément initial est intégré au noyau dont il occupe la première position. A cette différence syntaxique correspond une différence dans le mode de structuration informationnelle de l’énoncé (proposition catégorique ayant le complément pour thème et le noyau pour rhème et/ou focus vs. proposition thétique), qui elle-même induit deux types différents de stratégies discursives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is relatively common in Spanish to find the singular indirect object pronoun le even when the corresponding noun phrase is plural and one would therefore expect the use of les. While it is true that various grammarians have described this phenomenon, the attention paid to matter by linguists in quantitative research has been sparse, particularly regarding the written word. The current study investigates and documents the use of le for les in written Spanish through a systematic analysis of newspaper articles in 11 cities of the Spanish-speaking world. The newspaper pieces analysed have not only made it possible to determine which cities display the highest frequency of this use of le, and if it is thus possible to assign it regional dialectal patterns, but they have also aided in resolving conflicting viewpoints in the literature about the use of this singular pronoun. These includes, for example, whether le for les is mainly a spoken feature that is not normally seen in writing; whether it is something used by people with little formal schooling but not by those with a strong educational background; and if it is utilized more in connection with people or with inanimate objects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is an on-going debate amongst linguists regarding the status of the object marker (OM). Some scholars argue that OMs are agreement morphology (Baker 2010, Riedel 2009) while others argue that OMs are pronominal and not agreement morphology (Nevins 2010, Kramer, under review, Labelle 2007, Demuth & Johnson 1990, Mchombo 2002). The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this debate using data from Ikalanga to support the view that OMs are pronominal clitics. I discuss evidence in favor of the agreement analysis as well as that in favor of the pronominal analysis. OMs in Ikalanga behave like agreement morphology in that they attach only to the verbal stem, only one OM occurs in a clause, and they share grammatical features (person, gender and number) with the lexical NP with which they co-refer. However, there are many ways in which OMs behave like pronominals. For example, OMs do not vary in form according to the mood of a sentence or negation while subject markers, which I analyze as agreement morphemes do. They are not obligatory in Ikalanga sentences while subject markers are. OMs are not subject to locality constraints while agreement is. They can be bound by the subject (backward pronominalization), something unexpected of agreement and there is ample evidence to show that the lexical NP with which the OM co-refers is an adjunct, a fact which has been used in the literature to argue that the OM is pronominal in such a set up. The evidence in favor of the pronominal analysis however, is more compelling and therefore I conclude that OMs are pronominal clitics and not agreement morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Electronic Turkish Studies is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Spanish verbs associated with three participants - Agent, Theme and Recipient - may appear in alternating constructions, where the 3rd person recipient argument is realized as a prepositional phrase (PP) (Pedro envió una carta a María 'Peter sent a letter to Mary') or as one doubled by a clitic (Pedro le envió una carta a María 'Pedro sent Mary a letter'), the latter being referred to as an indirect object (IO). This paper provides a corpus-based study of the distributional patterns of the two constructions that includes both give-type and send-type verbs. The analysis of PPs and IOs in terms of referential properties shows that both have a strong tendency to be [+definite]. However, the distribution of the IO is more constrained than the PPs in terms of certain referential properties, although there are some lexical differences observed among the verbs. The PP, on the other hand, is free of any restrictions. One important contribution of this study is that it provides empirical evidence that the IO associated with the role of Recipient behaves very differently from the one assuming other roles: clitic doubling, which has become the norm for the latter, is still very restricted for the former, contrary to what has been commonly assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Scandinavian languages, sentential negation must be licensed in Spec–head relation in the IP-domain, necessitating leftward movement of negative objects, Negative Shift (NegS). While string-vacuous NegS is possible in all Scandinavian varieties, there is a fair amount of cross-linguistic variation in non-string-vacuous NegS. In particular, the varieties contrast in which constituents can be crossed by NegS and whether or not crossing of a certain constituent requires the presence of an intervening verb. The paper presents the complex variation as to the distribution of negative objects in Scandinavian, using data from different sources, and outlines an analysis within Fox & Pesetsky's (2003, 2005a, b) cyclic linearization model, which accounts for this variation by differences in the availability of the intermediate positions non-string-vacuous movement is forced to proceed through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yurakaré (unclassified, central Bolivia) marks core arguments on the verb by means of pronominal affixes. Subjects are suffixed, objects are prefixed. There are six types of head-marked objects in Yurakaré, each with its own morphosyntactic and semantic properties. Distributional patterns suggest that the six objects can be divided into two larger groups reminiscent of the typologically recognized direct vs. indirect object distinction. This paper looks at the interaction of this complex system of participant marking and verbal semantics. By investigating the participant-marking patterns of nine verb classes (four representing a gradual decrease of patienthood of the P participant, five a gradual decrease of agentivity of the A participant), I come to the conclusion that grammatical roles in Yurakaré can be defined semantically, and case frames are to a high degree determined by verbal semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study analyses the manner of conceptualising and of describing the secondary object (SO) in the latest treatise of Romanian Grammar (GALR 2005, 2008). To that effect, the five criteria presented by the academic treatise for the purpose of differentiating the SO from the direct object (DO) are considered both from the perspective of their consistency and from the perspective of the current tendencies in the dynamics of the Romanian language. With respect to consistency, the last three of the five criteria advanced by the GALR -- the impossibility of coordination between the SO and the DO, the existence of a different grid of thematic roles and the incompatibility between the SO and the indirect object (IO) -- are discarded as non-conclusive in the process of carrying out an efficient separation between the SO and the DO. Furthermore, we note the fact that, from the list of the 12 ditransitive verbs provided by the GALR (to announce, to listen, to convince, to teach, to examine, to inform, to learn, to ask, to advise, to state, to traverse and to pass), some have lost this trait in the current stage of evolution of the Romanian language. On the other hand, when the SO indicates an object co-referential to a 3rd person singular feminine clitic, in the common use of the Romanian language one can observe the tendency of constructing the SO with pe and, therefore, of substituting/ doubling it by the corresponding clitic (o), which results in these properties no longer functioning as distinctive traits of the DO in relation to the SO. In conclusion, none of the five criteria suggested by the GALR works as a diagnostic test in order to dissociate between the two functions (DO and SO). However, we think that this fact should not lead to the elimination of the SO function from the Romanian grammar, but merely to a more rigorous formalisation of the thematic roles characteristic to the SO and the DO. In our opinion, only such an operation shall be able to support a criterion which should be sufficiently solid to differentiate between the two syntactic functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the Cukurova University Institute of Social Sciences is the property of Cukurova University Institute of Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper proposes that there are two types of indirect object markers in the Chinese language: The go-type and the give-type. The chronological development of these two types of indirect object markers will be discussed. Moreover, with reference to the Cantonese dialects, this paper will examine the factors contributing to the replacement of the go-type marker by the give-type marker. Finally, this typology of the indirect object markers is discussed from an areal linguistic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the historic development of Indo-European languages. Particular attention is paid to relations between objects and verbs in Indo-European sentence structure. Speculation is raised concerning the influence of the switch from object-verb structures to verb-object structures on analytical procedure in Indo-European languages. Further comments are offered regarding the synthetic and analytic tendencies of languages such as Latin and Polish. The development of the French language is also taken into account.

The article presents a discussion on the use of the term "parenthetical." The integration of parenthetical information into sentence structure is discussed, along with reflections on the type of semantic information parentheticals can bring to a sentence. Further comments are given about the study of parentheticals as indexicals and as ways to alter the flow of meaning in a sentence, the remainder of which may become the sentence's object. Special note is taken of the complexity of parenthetical structures.

This paper argues that the difference between connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in specificational copular sentences is heavily influenced by semantics and information structure. It shows that anti-connectivity effects with respect to binding disappear when the influence of information structure is neutralized, whereas anti-connectivity effects with respect to scope result from the semantics of specificational sentences. These data lead to the conclusion that anti-connectivity effects cannot be used as evidence against a syntax-based approach to specificational sentences and binding, that the analysis of specificational sentences should include both a syntactic and a semantic device, and that the syntactic analysis of specificational sentences should rely crucially on their information structure. I present and adopt Heycock & Kroch's (2002) analysis for specificational sentences, in which connectivity effects result from the assembling of ground and focus. The fact that connectivity effects are also exhibited by verb-object-subject word order in French and Spanish, which is marked for the ground-focus partition, is presented as an important piece of independent evidence in favor of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slavic languages show differences in the syntactic realization of arguments of ditransitive verbs as, e.g., 'give'. While Czech and Russian use dative indirect objects (IOs) which precede the direct object (DO), IOs of ditransitives in Bulgarian are marked by a preposition-like element na and follow the DO. The question arises what is the basic linearization of arguments of ditransitives in Russian, Czech, and Bulgarian. We argue that the two structures attested in the languages under investigation do not correspond to what has become known as Dative Alternation in English and that there is no need for specific semantic representations for Bulgarian ditransitives. The hierarchy of argument variables is changed through application of a semantic template.

This paper demonstrates that the Double Object Construction exists in Bulgarian, a fact that has so far escaped notice due to the disguise in which the construction appears. Bulgarian is a language that allows an indirect object to be optionally doubled by a dative clitic. I claim, however, that this optionality has formal consequences: ditransitives with dative clitic doubling are equivalent to Double Object Constructions (DOC), where the DP Goal is projected higher than the DP Theme. Variants without dative clitic doubling, on the other hand, are Prepositional Ditransitive Constructions (PDC), where the DP Theme is projected higher than the PP Goal. Although not evident from the surface word order and morphology in Bulgarian, the availability of these two distinct structures is confirmed through classic diagnostics such as binding, weak crossover, and scope. After attesting the DOC in Bulgarian, I offer an analysis in which the dative clitic is the morphological realization of an applicative head. I also draw parallels with Romance, suggesting that UG may be implicated in this type of doubling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to test Keenan and Comrie's (1977) Accessibility Hierarchy, together with Fox's (1987) Absolutive Hypothesis, on the basis of eighteenth- and twentieth-century written English narrative data. While the patterns of relativisation differ very little across the two centuries, relativisation on intransitive subject (S-RCs) and on direct object (DO-RCs) occurs more frequently than relativisation on transitive subject (A-RCs) and on oblique (OBL-RCs). Moreover, OBL-RCs outnumber A-RCs. On the other hand, relativisation on genitive (GEN-RCs) occurs very infrequently and relativisation on indirect object (IO-RCs) is unattested. It is suggested that the high frequency of S-RCs and OBL-RCs falls out from written narrative requiring a considerable amount of description in order to indicate the states of people or other entities, or to set the scene. The high frequency of DO-RCs follows from Fox's (1987) suggestion that one of the main functions of RCs is to anchor the head NP in discourse; the other NP in a DO-RC, i.e. the transitive subject NP, tends to be pronominal, and, therefore, a good anchor. The infrequently occurring RCs, i.e. A-, GEN-, and IO-RCs, tend to be formed on grammatical relations that typically appear in pronominal form. In these RCs, therefore, the functions of RCs, whether to distinguish, describe, or anchor, become largely irrelevant. Thus, accessibility in relativisation is not so much motivated by a hierarchy of grammatical relations as by discourse preferences or properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a descriptive generalisation according to which a verbal or an event argument is merged as an indirect object (IO) when the direct object (DO) position is occupied. Our goal is to formalise this generalisation and to show how current syntactic theory provides the necessary tools to support it. Specifically, the converging consensus that all so-called intransitive verbs have an internal nominal argument resolves previous exceptions to the generalisation and shows that the transitivity restriction on thematic IOs is structural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that language-particular restrictions on ditransitive constructions are best understood as instantiations of easily falsifiable implicational universals that can be explained functionally, rather than as falling out from a restrictive formal metalanguage. Well-known restrictions on ditransitives in English (*She gave Kim it) and French (*Elle donna Kim le livre) are shown to be instantiations of inverse patterns that are completely parallel to inverse patterns in monotransitive constructions. Moreover, ditransitive constructions are parallel to monotransitives in that they exhibit differential recipient marking and differential theme marking, analogous to differential object and subject marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a crosslinguistic morphological study of the ordering of verbal Direct Object (DO)and Indirect Object (IO)markers,both af .xal and clitic, in languages where the verb can code two objects simultaneously.Of the six possibilities (V--IO--DO,V--DO--IO,IO --DO--V,DO --IO--V,IO--V --DO,DO--V --IO),the last two are strongly disfavored,while the .rst four are all roughly equally common.These four orderings show no conditioning and seem ran- domly distributed,except that V--IO--DO shows a weak preference for Europe and Africa.This randomness excludes any attempt at explanation based on "natural functional principles".On the other hand,taking Arabic dialectology as a laboratory case,the paper explores a diachronic approach to the random- ness of double-object orderings:"second-stage cliticization",where a second object marker is cliticized onto a single-object-marking verb.A typology of the internal composition of IO vs.DO markers is also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the linguistic signifiers that are used to represent speech and how to set up a research project to teach direct and indirect speech from a critical language awareness perspective. Overview of the research project; Questions included in the questionnaire; Results of how students expressed their understanding of speech reporting.

Focuses on grammarians' definitions of an indirect object based on the remarks offered in Seppanen and Herriman papers. Usual nature of an object as a nominal element; Object as a complement of the verb; Resistance of indirect object to movement; Indirect objects as an optional element; Application of the term indirect objects to certain personal pronouns as an extension use of the term.

The article focuses on a study aimed at describing the plurals in Tamil and Telugu languages. It notes that such languages belong to Subject, Object and Verb (SOV) group. It cites that plurals imply more than one thing or person, and plural markers are generally added with the nouns in both languages. Examples from Tamil and Telugu which highlight morphophonemic changes are also provided.

The article discusses the method of teaching indirect object (IO), which is one way of teaching grammar. The methodology enables the students to identify the IO of the sentence by emphasizing that IO is the recipient of the action. In addition, various illustrations are presented to easily understood the lesson.