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This article offers a quantitative study of the genitive and nominative/accusative plural inflections in Owun's gloss (Rushworth2) to the Rushworth Gospels in comparison with Aldred's gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It focuses on three inter-paradigmatic analogical changes attested in Rushworth2: (1) the extension of genitive singular -es from the a-stems to other noun classes, (2) the spread of nominative/accusative plural -as from masculine a-stems to neuter a-stems and other declensions and (3) the extension of genitive plural -ena from the weak nouns to a-stems. The main aim of this article is to establish the scale on which these analogical changes are found in Rushworth2. The results are compared with those obtained in the study of Lindisfarne to determine the degree of similarity between the two glosses with regard to these processes and shed light on the question of whether Owun copied from Aldred or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the structure of the secondary predicates in Standard Arabic using the Minimalist Program. The main aim of the paper is to make generalizations about the structure as well as to find a uniform analysis of this structure. Among the most important results reached are as follows: The secondary predicates have a unified structure that is derived from small clauses that form a phase. In addition, despite having one unified structure, these predicates have distinct positions. Moreover, secondary predicates also possess shared arguments (with main predicates) and secondary predicates differ depending on the types of shared argument it modifies. We also find that the apparent 'accusative' Case shown on the secondary predicates has nothing to do with verbs. In fact, the Case hosted on secondary predicates is an abstract Case, which is derived through the genitive Case parameter. Finally, the control structure provided by some predicates is derived by copying and merging the shared argument from the specifier of the small clause to a higher position in the sentence structure, noting that the empty element PRO does not exist within the proposed analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper uses facts about case allomorphy and possessive morphology in Balkar, a Turkic language spoken in southern Russia, to contribute to the examination of the internal structure of case. A number of recent findings in morpho-syntactic research indicate that case markers have a richer internal structure than their surface appearance typically suggests. Specifically, many works in this vein argue based on cross-linguistic facts about phenomena such as suppletion and syncretism that case features are organized into an implicational containment hierarchy. In this hierarchy, accusative case contains the features of the nominative, and the accusative is itself a sub-part of oblique cases. Many arguments for case containment have relied on diagnostics that are less direct than surface-level morpho-syntactic analysis. In this paper, I argue that there is a part of Balkar grammar that shows the containment of accusative case by obliques in a surface-evident way. While such containment is not normally evident in Balkar, I argue that in certain possessed oblique NPs we see an overt expression of the accusative, except when phonological factors interfere. I go on to discuss other related topics about Balkar and the case containment hypothesis more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article describes an Old English (OE) progenitor for Middle English accusative pronoun his. It identifies the psalter material from the "Dictionary of Old English Corpus" as the OE attestation evidence for accusative his. The example of his as a plural object in the ninth-century gloss in the "Vespasian Psalter" is noted. Also explained are the types of evidence that can be applied to determine the status of his in the OE psalter glosses.

This paper attempts to elucidate the peculiar nature of double complement unaccusatives (DCUs). Among the two widely-held diagnostics for subjecthood in Japanese, i. e. zibun-binding and subject honorification, the subject of DCUs passes the former but not the latter. First, recognizing two subtypes of ditransitive verbs, verbs of change of possession (VCPs) and verbs of change of location (VCLs), we will note that DCUs are generally formed on VCPs. Next, given our layered verb phrase hypothesis, the ni-phrase in DCUs as well as VCPs is base-generated in Spec of Low Applicative (L-Appl), and it is moved to Spec of v for dat case marking. Spec of v is high enough for zibun-binding. However, since the target of subject honorification is licensed in Spec of High Applicative (H-Appl), the ni-phrase, base-generated in Spec of L-Appl, should further move to Spec of H-Appl. This is prohibited due to a feature-based version of theta criterion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Standard Arabic (SA) complementizer known as 'inna poses a restriction on word order in the clause it introduces and induces accusative Case-marking on the otherwise nominative preverbal NPs.1 Following Chomsky's (2001) account of the morphosyntax of Case, this paper argues that 'inna is a Case assigner and thus it carries an uninterpretable Case feature that determines the value which it assigns to an unvalued Case feature concerning accessible goal within A-bar projection. The paper shows that this argument captures the restriction imposed on 'inna-clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a corpus of 140 proleptic accusatives from early Latin, this article presents new information concerning both the syntax and the pragmatic context of this construction. An investigation into the predicate frames and complementation patterns of the governing verbs is used to illustrate internal syntactic variation of the construction (particularly concerning nosco). An analysis of the pragmatic function of the whole corpus confirms the earlier view that the proleptic constituents are predominantly topics in their discourse contexts. However, a function of contrast is established and shown to be relevant in the case of personal pronouns as proleptic accusatives. Furthermore, it is suggested that using proleptic accusatives may be a major strategy of overt subject expression in the complement clauses with certain governing verb forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applicatives of unaccusatives provide a crucial test case for the inherent-case view of ergativity. If ergative is assigned only to external arguments, in their θ-positions, there can be no "raising to ergative" in applicative unaccusatives; an internal argument subject can never receive ergative case. In this article, I present evidence from Nez Perce (Sahaptian) that this prediction is false. In Nez Perce applicative unaccusatives, the theme argument raises over the applicative argument and is accordingly marked with ergative case. Nez Perce thus demonstrates raising to ergative. Departing from Baker's (2014) conclusions for similar phenomena in Shipibo (Panoan), I argue that apparently nonlocal movement of the theme in the raising-to-ergative pattern involves not a covert adpositional structure, but rather a response to independently motivated constraints on antilocal movement and remnant movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hierarchical argument marking systems have long been treated as exceptions in alignment typology since they do not follow the same logic as, for example, nominative-accusative systems in creating subsets of argument roles that are treated identically. A recent proposal by Witzlack-Makarevich and colleagues advocates for "exhaustive alignment" as a way around this problem. This paper applies this methodology to the present-day Guaykuruan languages (Kadiwéu, Mocoví, Pilagá, Toba) with three goals: firstly, it expands on the methodology, providing a proposal on how to apply the method to languages with split-intransitive characteristics. Secondly, the paper shows how alignment subsystems in languages with hierarchical alignment can provide additional evidence for the phylogenetic relations between languages. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how a construction-specific approach to alignment can uncover a greater degree of variety in alignment patterns, revealing that a number of Pilagá and Toba morphemes show {SA, O} vs. {SO, A} alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the problem of definite article in the Gothic Bible. More specifically, it concentrates on the differences and similarities of use between the target language, i.e. Gothic, and the source language, i.e. Greek, with special attention being paid to the case of the article - nominative, genitive, dative or accusative. It is part of a larger endeavor aiming at the analysis of the whole Gothic Bible in this respect. This time the Gospel of John is taken into consideration, following an earlier study which concentrated on the Gospel of Matthew. In the paper it will not only be observed how frequently Gothic omits the definite article in places where Greek uses it in the Gospel of John, but also in what way the cases of the definite article vary in both languages due to their grammatical specificities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactic functions are best conceptualized as prototypical associations of features at a variety of formal and semantic levels, which elements in actual clauses will match to different extents. In Spanish, the prototypical (accusative) object has a third‐person, inanimate, non‐autonomous entity as its referent. The encoding of the direct participants, i.e. the first and second persons, as syntactic objects will entail a displacement from the prototype that can have significant functional and meaningful effects. Based on a corpus of oral and written Peninsular Spanish, the study addresses the main patterns of quantitative variation and contextual choice of first‐ and second‐person object encoding. Both the differences across syntactic functions, persons and numbers and the main features of formal variability within the clause—explicit formulation vs. morphological indexation, as well as preverbal vs. postverbal placement when formulated—are taken into account. It is concluded that the cognitive salience associated with first‐ and second‐person objects makes them functionally and cognitively similar to syntactic subjects. In turn, the different choices related to their formal configuration can be used to modulate the degree of involvement attributed to their referents in the content of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper focusses on the issue of the terminological labels used in grammatical descriptions and to what extent they are necessary. The label discussed here is the so-called infinitivus indignantis, mainly employed to express emotions like surprise, disdain, indignation. To this construction handbooks and grammars generally devote just a few lines. In this paper it will be shown that the syntactic features associated with this pattern occur with other similar constructions and are not exclusive thereof. The question is raised whether this pattern could be analyzed and subsumed under the category of mirativity. At the end of the analysis of this type of infinitive, it is claimed that infinitivus indignantis is not a necessary label. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to account for peculiar binding properties of non-nominative arguments of Polish psychological predicates focusing on accusative Object Experiencers (hence, OE). It has been observed that although Polish anaphors are subject oriented, they can be bound by accusative experiencers (Bondaruk and Szymanek 2007; Tajsner 2008; Wiland 2016). At the same time, these arguments, unlike nominative subjects, are also proper antecedents for both reflexive and pronominal possessives. This mixed behaviour poses a puzzle for the traditional formulation of Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981, 1986; Manzini and Wexler 1987; Rappaport 1986; Willim 1986/1989; Reinders-Machowska 1991), which assumes complementarity between anaphors and pronominals in their local domains and plainly states that the subject is the privileged binder in Slavic. We base our analysis on a number of recent proposals, including Hicks (2009), Safir (2014) and Nikolaeva (2014), following Hestvik (1992). The proposal implements the concept of binding as (upward) Agree as well as Index Raising (IR), where the head of the anaphoric/ pronominal element (henceforth the index) is (covertly) moved and adjoined to v or T. Lexicalisation and distribution of anaphoric and pronominal elements is determined by two factors: the movement of the index and the case position of the binder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a usage-based approach to the construction [locative deictic + accusative clitic + intransitive verb] found in Galician/Galego. In this construction, the intransitive verb and the accusative clitic agree in person and number and, in the case of the clitic, also in gender with the referent of the clitic, as in, for example, aí a está (lit.: ‘there her is/there she is’)/aí as están (lit.: ‘there them are/there they are’). A corpus-based analysis of this construction shows that it presents skewed grammatical patterns in terms of frequency of occurrence. This grammatical skewing reveals that the construction emerges from an interactional usage pattern in which speakers shift from a displaced to an immediate mode of speaking to present a counter-expected situation. The construction is also exploited in narratives in order to create a quality of immediacy for displaced events. Our usage-based analysis also reveals a family of constructions — some more schematic, others more specific; some more entrenched, others more novel — that emerge from the repetition of local usage patterns through which speakers/narrators express immediacy and counter-expectation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic Research 35(2), 275-304. This paper investigates the clausal nature of Korean Right-Dislocation Constructions (RDCs) and reconsiders recent extant (non-)uniform analyses of RDCs. Since Korean is a pro-drop language, most of the literature on Korean RDCs assumes the preverbal empty category as pro or a trace out of movement in the constructions. However, recent literature has shown that null arguments can also be derived via argument ellipsis (e.g. Sakamoto 2016). The paper identifies the categorial statuses of preverbal empty categories and demonstrates similarities and differences between gapped and gapless RDCs that Ko (2016) and Ahn and Cho (2016, 2017) do not observe. It argues that a non-uniform analysis is most compatible to account for the distribution of empty categories of RDCs. The proposed analysis receives support form novel evidence based on (non-)parallelisms between RDCs and fragment answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A phenomenon often termed “optional ergative marking” is found in a number of genetically unrelated languages. Yali, a Trans-New Guinea language spoken in West Papua, shows striking similarities to optional ergative systems as described in the literature. This paper focuses on the relation between agentivity and discourse prominence, and argues in favour of a systematic distinction between semantic and syntactic contexts as conditioning factors for optional ergative marking. It further provides new evidence for the close interplay of ergative marking and what has been termed “discourse prominence” in descriptions of some other languages and shows that in Yali, optional ergative marking operates on both the global and the local level of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the I. A. Shliapkin Collection in the manuscript department of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, Russia which is a piece of card with photographs showing plaster impressions of seven Old Russian inscriptions. It discusses the seventh inscription stating that text in lines 5–10 makes up a double accusative construction.

In this comparative study of ancient Semitic languages, I present data on the development of personal pronouns and accusative markers. My meta-analysis combines what is known about the major representative languages from both East and West Semitic languages in order to focus on three gradual, corresponding developments: (1) the erosion of inflected oblique independent personal pronouns; (2) the disappearance of the case-ending system; and (3) the emergence of the independent object marker. A bird's-eye view of the documented evidence on Semitic languages suggests that in West Semitic languages, both the oblique independent personal pronoun and the case-ending system gradually disappeared. In parallel, a set of object markers was introduced into West Semitic. This process will be shown to progress at a different pace for the various languages in this branch, and to be relevant not only to the North-west Semitic branch, but rather to the span of old West Semitic languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on introspection (i.e. the researcher's own intuition and judgment) has been the normal practice particularly in generative linguistics. However, especially when faced with crucial data for the development of a linguistic theory or for the right characterization of a linguistic phenomenon, it is important to rely on more scientific data. Against this background, this paper conducts two acceptability judgment tests and shows that none of the claims made in the literature as to the alternation between – key and – tolok and the alternation between the nominative and the accusative case with respect to Korean resultatives is so accurate. By methodologically relying on a number of subjects and taking into consideration both the factor of whether there is a distinct nominative-marked NP from what the main verb is predicated of and the factors of the category of the main predicate and the category of the – key /– tolok predicate, the experiment on the key - tolok alternation reveals that, generally, – key and – tolok can alternate with each other only when the – key /– tolok predicate is a verb. Meanwhile, by taking into consideration not only the factor of the category of the key -predicate but also the factor of whether the NP thematically predicated of by the key -predicate is also thematically an argument of the main verb, the experiment on the nominative-accusative alternation shows that the alternation is truly allowed only when the key -predicate is formed with an adjective plus the – ci suffix and that the use of the accusative case is the norm in co-argument key -sentences and the use of the nominative case is the norm in non-co-argument key -sentences. Through these two case studies, this paper stresses the importance of not relying purely on the researcher's own introspection in linguistic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the interclausal relations hierarchy in relation to the data of eight Sardinian complex predicates. It notes that the whole construction selects the auxiliary which would select as a simple predicate. It adds that nuorese is an unaccusative verb with purposive value when it is found in compound tenses and involves movement. It adds that fronting, negation and modal operators suggest that the two predicates of the former construction are set in two separate cores.

Case assignment and argument licensing in process nominals, that is, nouns such as destruction that are morphologically related to verbs are assumed to operate in a verblike manner both within government-and-binding theory and, more recently, within the distributed morphology framework. The data from Russian challenge this approach and reveal that there is an important difference between the verbal and the nominal domains: case assignment in verbs is sensitive to the underlying argument structure, but in nominals to surface structure, that is, the collection of overt arguments. We propose a hierarchy of case-assignment rules that applies in the nominal domain. Moreover, within the nominal domain, case assignment is uniform: the same rules apply to different types of nominals, including prototypical process nominals and relational nouns. The main theoretical advantage of our lexicalist, constraint-based approach is that it can capture similarities between the verbal and the nominal domains, seen in the assignment of inherent and lexical cases, but also in their fundamental differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a genitive marker, instead of an accusative or a nominative marker, is realized with the first nominal in a multiple case marking (MCM) construction that is relevant to the inalienable possessive structures in Korean, the given sentence may receive an idiomatic interpretation. The nominative possessum within MCM constructions may participate in either preserving or triggering idiomatic interpretations, whereas the accusative possessum may only participate in preserving idiomatic meanings and not in triggering them. With consideration to MCM constructions and passivization which enable idiomatic interpretations to be preserved or triggered compositionally in syntax, we argue that the passive verbal ending (a/e) ci qualifies as the strongest passive marker whereas the overt passive morpheme i/hi/li/ki is the next strongest, and the null passive morpheme ∅PASS the weakest. Hence, we propose that at least within idiomatic domains the null passive morpheme should be regarded as a quasi-passive morpheme which is remarkably different from the overt passive morpheme i/hi/li/ki or the passive verbal ending (a/e) ci. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the morphosyntax of accusative-subject constructions in Icelandic, from the point of view of the 'dependent case' analysis of accusative. The primary focus is on deriving the Accusative-Subject Generalization (ASG), the generalization that accusative subjects are never related thematically to a morphologically intransitive verb. After it is demonstrated that the ASG holds, it is proposed that the ASG follows from the claim that there is no such thing as inherently case-marked accusatives in Icelandic. The accusative-subject constructions under scrutiny in fact involve a silent external argument that distributes like a clitic syntactically and is interpreted like a weather pronoun semantically. The account is explanatory insofar as it involves one stipulation-the presence of a silent clitic-from which the ASG and numerous other syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties of accusative-subject constructions follow. The explanatory value of the account hinges on a grammatical architecture in which morphological idiosyncrasy and semantic idiosyncrasy are computed in distinct components of the grammar, and case marking-even structural case marking-is divorced from DP licensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate how Turkish children analyze language input in the process of acquisition of verbs and argument structures in their first language. To this end, a task including 24 sentences was presented to 12 Turkish children whose ages range between 3,4 to 5,0. Out of these 24 sentences, 12 sentences included morphologically transitive verbs whereas the other 12 ones included lexically transitive verbs. Further, in the 12 sentences, objects of the verbs were presented with accusative case marker in different word orders. Moreover, the word order was intentionally modified in some sentences. The aim of the task was to elicit the sensitivity of Turkish children to causative morphology, accusative case marker, and word order in the acquisition of verbs and argument structures of Turkish. The results indicate that Turkish children use language-specific cues in the interpretation of verbs and their argument structures, which is causative morphology for Turkish. In addition, Turkish children appear to use semantic mechanism in order to interpret the argument structures of verbs in sentences with modified word order. All of these results support the view of Tomasello (1992) as children seem to acquire verbs and argument structures without the presence of innate ability, but through the interaction with input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the knowledge of unaccusativity in Japanese native, heritage, and second/foreign language speakers with respect to licensing of floating numeral quantifiers (FNQs) by unaccusative and unergative subjects (theFNQ diagnostic). Two acceptability judgment experiments were conducted to examine (i) whether and how judgments of the three populations differ with respect to the FNQ paradigm and (ii) whether and how manipulations of agentivity of subjects and telicity of events affect their judgments of the FNQ diagnostic. Our findings show that (i) the native and heritage speakers’ knowledge about the FNQ diagnostic are largely indistinguishable from each other, (ii) some L2 speakers’ judgments show signs of initial development of the knowledge of the FNQ diagnostic, and (iii) telicity shows clear effects on the FNQ diagnostic with all three groups, while the effects of agentivity are subtle and detectible only with the native and heritage speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates the role of prosodic cues and explicit information (EI) in the acquisition of German accusative case markers. We compared 4 groups of 3rd-semester learners (low intermediate level) who completed 1 of 4 Processing Instruction (PI) treatments that manipulated the presence or absence of EI and focused prosody. The results showed that, when training included EI or prosodic cues, the groups improved on comprehension and production tasks in an immediate posttest. Four weeks after training, the groups sustained gains on the comprehension task, but not on the production task. Participants who did not receive EI or prosody only showed improvement on the comprehension task in the immediate posttest and did not sustain these gains. These findings replicate previous findings on the role of EI in PI, showing an advantage for EI with the target form (e.g., Henry, Culman, & VanPatten, 2009). Moreover, the results suggest that prosodic cues help learners process morphosyntactic forms, and that they can enhance grammar instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether the mental representation of sentences contains a morphological representation of case marking, using a priming technique. Thirty-six native Korean speakers listened to and repeated spoken prime sentences and described visually presented target pictures. The prime sentences were manipulated for the presence of an accusative case-marker -lul/-ul. To investigate whether the previously reported animacy effects on case drop generalizes to a different task, animacy of the direct object was also manipulated. The results showed that there was a stronger bias to produce the accusative case-marker when the direct object was animate than when the direct object was inanimate, replicating the previously reported animacy effects on accusative case drop (Lee 2006a, 2006b; Chung 2013) in a syntactic priming task. Furthermore, case marking on inanimate direct objects was influenced by whether or not the accusative case marker was produced earlier in the prime, providing evidence for the presence of an abstract representation of case marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report two experiments on the referential resolution of the German subject pronoun er and the demonstrative der (‘he’). Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the effects of grammatical role, thematic role and the information status of potential referents in the antecedent clause operationalized by word-order (canonical/non-canonical), in the context of active–accusative verbs (Exp. 1) and dative-experiencer verbs (Exp. 2). In information-structurally neutral contexts, er prefers the proto-agent and der the proto-patient. This suggests that agentivity is a better predictor for pronoun resolution than subjecthood or sentence topic as previously proposed. It further supports the claim that agentivity is a core property of language processing and it more generally substantiates the proposal from cognitive sciences that agentivity represents core knowledge of the human attentional system. With non-canonical antecedent clauses, because they lack alignment of prominence features, interpretive preferences become less stable, indicating that multiple cues are involved in pronoun resolution. The data further suggest that the demonstrative pronoun elicits more reliable interpretive biases than the personal pronoun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a variationist study on subject position in Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Quechua bilinguals in Huancayo, Peru. Such a variable is ideal to examine the universal predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (IH), since it involves two interfaces constraining subject position choice in Spanish: the syntactic-semantic one (internal) and the syntactic-pragmatic one (external). The IH predicts that the acquisition of features at internal interfaces should bear no difficulty for bilinguals, in contrast with the acquisition of features at external interfaces. Multiple regression analyses reveal that the differences found go along the lines of the universal predictions of the IH: the unaccusativity of the subjects' verbs (internal interface) is a strong predictor of the VS order for the bilinguals, whereas focus (external interface) does not constrain said variant. Nonetheless, some Quechua properties appear as an alternative explanation, rather peculiar to the contact situation studied, to the contrast found between the two speaker groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses the problem of translating the cognate accusative (CA) from Arabic into English. It also studies whether the translations studied achieve the optimal pragmatic meaning and force. It attempts to discover how cognate accusatives in the Holy Qur'an have been dealt with in translations done by a number of professional translators. In this study, the researcher will compare the different translations done by different translators, as Mohammad Muhsin Khan, Yusuf Ali, Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall and Zaid Shakir. The aim is to discover how the cognate accusative has been dealt with; hence, the study will be involved in the basis of direct and indirect translation approaches to show how the translators manage to semantically and pragmatically render the source cognate accusative in the target language, the ensuing loss of meaning and ways of compensation. The study is to be empirical, analytical, and comparative, in the sense that it intends to observe the translators' decision-making in rendering the source text in the target language, whether they follow the direct or indirect translations to render the meaning in the target language. It studies whether the translations achieve the optimal meaning and force, both linguistically and pragmatically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greek papyrus letters preserve not only instances of the replacement of the dative case; they also show the use of the dative instead of the accusative case as direct object and disjoint infinitival subject. This interchange is mostly found in epistolary phrases, namely the salutation formula (ἀσπάζομαί σε) and the initial (εὔχομαί σε ὑγιαίνειν) and final (ἐρρῶσθαί σε εὔχομαι) health wishes. The phonetic similarity of the pronouns might have created the circumstances for case confusion. Contamination of the constructions reflects the difficulties of the scribes to construct conservative epistolary phrases and, thereby, diachronic phraseological variation might reflect language change. In salutation formulas, the use of a dative Addressee could be explained by analogical overextension from the category of communication verbs taking a dative complement. The decline of the accusative and infinitive construction might be one of the reasons why the accusative disjoint infinitival subject is replaced by the dative case in health wishes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper discusses dative cliticization in Modern Greek in passives and unaccusatives. Based on crosslinguistic evidence, I show that dative cliticization is not implicated in movement operations that violate the Minimal Link Condition ( MLC). Instead, the observed cliticization patterns exhaustively reduce to the effects of a generalized form of a Doubly Filled Comp Filter. In particular, I show applicative morphemes can be selectively overt also in Indo-European languages like Greek and that the selective spell-out of these morphemes positively correlates with the absence of external arguments (Spec, vP). The discussion posits an incremental spell-out pattern for complex terminals and highlights the reality of head movement as a syntactic operation. The paper also revisits the claim that clitics constitute a heterogeneous class of items and that their morphosyntactic properties might depend on the transitivity/voice of the hosting predicate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German inalienable possession constructions with a PP-embedded possessum come in three variants: (i) with external possessor (EP), (ii) with internal possessor (IP), and (iii) with doubly-marked possession (DMP). Choice of dat(ive) versus acc(usative) case adds two more options. To capture this variation with a formal-syntactic account, this contribution posits (a) possessor raising from Spec DP of the possessum to affectee vP, triggered by lack of case in Spec DP, for dat EPs, (b) a base-generation possessor-as-direct-object analysis of acc EPs, (c) gen(itive) as last resort, triggered by the lack of a case licensor in the verbal domain, for IPs, and (d) a combined base-generation and gen-as-last-resort analysis of DMPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the nature of syntactic ergativity in the Mayan language Kaqchikel. Drawing on data from two production tasks, one designed to elicit relative clauses and the other to elicit wh questions, we show that despite its portrayal in the literature, Kaqchikel is not uniformly syntactically ergative with respect to A-bar extraction. Rather, its wh questions have ergative syntax, while its relative clauses exhibit nominative-accusative syntax. These findings contribute not only to the study of Mayan languages, but also to an understanding of the typology of ergativity in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch impersonal passives are often considered to be only compatible with atelic volitional verbs, such as werken 'work', lachen 'laugh', and zwemmen 'swim'. Two recent corpus studies, however, argue that a wider range of verbs is compatible with the construction, presenting examples of attested impersonal passives with telic and non-volitional verbs. This paper lends further support to this view, by providing an exploratory study of the frequencies of different intransitive verbs appearing in the construction, as well as a discussion of the telicity of attested impersonal passives with vallen 'fall' and sterven 'die'. The paper concludes that also with these telic non-volitional verbs, the impersonal passive merely conveys the occurrence of the type of act described by the verb, without specifying whether this occurrence is constituted by a single or multiple events, or whether it involves one or more participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eskimo-Uralic hypothesis of a genetic link between Eskimo-Aleut and the Uralic languages is now reaching its second centenary. Two major problems with its advancement since Bergsland’s (1959) summary of its status are addressed in this article. The first of these is the lack of an obvious correlate of the ubiquitous Eskimo-Aleut (EA) relative case marker -m in Uralic; the other is the lack of an m-initial first person singular morpheme in EA to correlate with that of the Uralic languages. That the EA singular genitive/relative marker -m — as well as the instrumental/accusative singular -mək based on it — might be cognate with Uralic singular accusative -m was suggested already by Sauvageot (1953), but no firm conclusion on the matter has since been reached. This has remained a tantalizing possibility, despite the conflicting semantics. However, the remarkable morphosyntactic parallels between Eskimo-Aleut and Samoyedic in particular have grown more apparent with recent publications. A solution is proposed, linking the emergence of ergativity in the Eskimo-Aleut family with a reanalysis of the original nominative-accusative case marking system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper reconsiders the history of two little-known third-person pronouns - 3pl. acc. his and 3sg. fem. acc. his - attested only during Middle English. Competing theories of their origins are evaluated and a novel account is proposed. The paper highlights an important gap in our understanding of the history of English oblique pronouns and supplies the most comprehensive description yet published of the distribution of these innovative forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the accusative constructions of Milyan words in the history of literature. Topics discussed include significant achievement of the Phellian nymphs, once discovered by author, D. Schürr, in historical linguistics and ancient history; degree of accuracy of the texts; and elimination of semantically important adjective related to related CLuvian languag.

In Old English, the ditransitive construction with an accusative (direct) object and a dative (indirect) object occurred with two alternating object orders: ACC-DAT vs. DAT-ACC. This study examines the motivations behind the OE speakers' choice for one of both orders. The effect of 16 factors was evaluated based on a corpus sample of N = 2409 sentences drawn from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003). The data was analysed by means of a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis. The results indicate that the ACC+DAT alternation was largely driven by the same factors that motivate the dative alternation in later stages of British English. However, no evidence was found for specific verb preferences in Old English, which suggests that the OE object alternation was less driven by semantics than the dative alternation in PDE. It is argued that the results further substantiate Wolk et al.'s (2012) claim that the cognitive mechanisms underlying present-day probabilistic patterns also underlie past variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction έν + accusative is a ghost in the dialect of Cyrene. The local inscriptions overwhelmingly attest to ές + accusative. A few alleged occurrences of this feature must be discarded. The only valid example, έν στάλ[αν] λυγδίναν in the 'Pact of the first settlers' (SEG 9.3, 16-7, 4th c. BCE), remains an anomaly that calls for a justification. The paper tries to demonstrate that the co-occurrence of άναγράφω/καταγράφω ές + accusative and άναγράφω/καταγράφω έν + dative resulted in an unintentional blending of both constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine in this paper three different contexts in Standard Arabic in which the preverbal subject appears with an accusative Case marker. The first context arises when the preverbal subject is preceded by a complementiser. The second context is when the subject is preceded by sentential negation particles. The third context is when the subject is followed by a tenseless verb in nonfinite clauses. In this paper, I provide a new analysis to account for these instances of preverbal accusative subjects in this language. The new analysis assumes the existence of two different syntactic positions for the preverbal subject: i) spec-TP, which hosts the grammatical subject; and ii) a higher spec-SubjP, a projection between CP and TP that hosts subjects of predication, along lines discussed in Cardinaletti (2004). I argue that the preverbal subject appears in spec-SubjP with an inherent accusative Case. Crucially, I assume that preverbal accusative subjects in this language have not moved from spec-vP, but base-positioned in spec-SubjP. The new analysis of preverbal accusative subjects in Standard Arabic accounts for these instances in terms of availability of syntactic positions, rather than optionality in Case marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study examines the acquisition route of object clitics with a view to identifying to what extent language acquisition data can shed light on the old debate with respect to the first Merge position of clitics: in the V-domain or in a higher position in the functional layer of the clause. The analysis of three longitudinal corpora of monolingual Romanian and the results of two elicited production tasks reveal an early stage when Accusative clitics occur exclusively in post-verbal position followed by a stage when the production rate is higher in post-verbal than in pre-verbal position. Building on the assumption that acquisition stages are ‘intermediate’ grammars which represent sub-grammars of the adult system, we argue in favour of a first Merge position of object clitics in the V-domain. In support of this claim the results obtained in a task eliciting the production of 3rd person Accusative clitics as well as the response pattern in a 2nd vs. 3rd person accusative clitic production task reveal an effect on early clitics of feature mismatch between the antecedent of the clitic and the subject of the clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates case usage with the verb bojat'sja 'be scared' in Russian. Many verbs with -sja never combine with objects in the accusative case. The verb bojat'sja historically was among them, but this verb is undergoing a shift and is currently used with both genitive and accusative objects. This study examines the parameters that motivate this change. Using data from the Russian National Corpus and an experimental study, this article shows that the accusative case is more likely to appear when the object is individuated. It is furthermore demonstrated that the use of accusative objects depends on register: Less restricted registers, such as newspaper texts and answers in the experiment, show higher use of accusative objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the strategies used by people to request others to do things, there is a particular family defined as pre-requests . The typical function of a pre-request is to check whether some precondition obtains for a request to be successfully made. A form like the Italian interrogative hai x ‘do you have x’, for example, is used to ask if an object is available — a requirement for the object to be transferred or manipulated. But what does it mean exactly to make a pre-request? What difference does it make compared to issuing a request proper? In this article, I address these questions by examining the use of hai x ‘do you have x’ interrogatives in a corpus of informal Italian interaction. Drawing on methods from conversation analysis and linguistics, I show that the status of hai x as a pre-request is reflected in particular properties in the domains of preference and sequence organisation, specifically in the design of blocking responses to the pre-request, and in the use of go-ahead responses, which lead to the expansion of the request sequence. This study contributes to current research on requesting as well as on sequence organisation by demonstrating the response affordances of pre-requests and by furthering our understanding of the processes of sequence expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]