Ergativity in the Caucasus

2021 ◽  
pp. 782-810
Author(s):  
Dmitry Ganenkov
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Region ◽  
High Concentration ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Structural Locus ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Case Assignment ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Structural Nature ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Subject Raising

This chapter provides an overview of ergativity-related phenomena in the languages of the Caucasus, a geographical region with a high concentration of ergative languages. The chapter reviews the morphologically ergative nature of the languages, revealed in case marking and gender agreement in Nakh-Daghestanian as well as person marking in Northwest Caucasian. No manifestation of syntactic ergativity is observed in languages of the Caucasus, with the exception of relativization in Circassian. It also reviews ergative splits observed in the Caucasus and describes attested patterns of split subject case marking in intransitive clauses. Finally, various properties usually thought to attest to the inherent or structural nature of ergative arguments are discussed: theta-relatedness, behavior in subject-to-subject raising, ability to participate in hierarchical agreement, the DP versus PP distinction, the structural locus of ergative case assignment, and some problems for configurational approaches to case assignment.

Extending the Person-Case Constraint to Gender: Agreement, Locality, and the Syntax of Pronouns

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Steven Foley ◽  
Maziar Toosarvandani
Keyword(s):  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Functional Head ◽  
Person Case Constraint ◽  
Person Features ◽  
Asymmetrical Shape ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Combinatorial Space ◽  
Crosslinguistic Variation ◽  
Gender System

In many languages with clitic or other weak pronouns, a Person-Case Constraint (Perlmutter 1971, Bonet 1991) prohibits certain combinations of these pronouns on the basis of their person features. This article explores the crosslinguistic variation in such constraints, starting with several closely related Zapotec varieties. These restrict combinations of clitics not just on the basis of person, but also on the basis of a finely articulated, largely animacy-based gender system. Operating within a larger combinatorial space, these constraints offer a new perspective on the typology of Phi-Case Constraints (ΦCCs) more generally. This typology has an overall asymmetrical shape correlating with the underlying syntactic position of pronominal arguments. We develop a principled theory of this typology that incorporates three hypotheses: (a) ΦCCs arise from how a functional head Agrees with clitic pronouns, subject to intervention-based locality (Anagnostopoulou 2003, Béjar and Rezac 2003, 2009); (b) the variation in these constraints arises from variation in the relativization of probes (Anagnostopoulou 2005, Nevins 2007, 2011); and (c) clitic and other weak pronouns have no inherent need to be licensed via Agree with a functional head. Under this account, the crosslinguistic typology of ΦCCs has the potential to shed light on the grammatical representation of person and gender.

Adjectives and Adverbs

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-156
Author(s):  
Florence Lydia Graham
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
And Gender

The fifth chapter focuses on adjectives and adverbs borrowed from Turkish into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bosnian and Bulgarian. These turkisms can be derived from Turkish nouns, adjectives, and/or adverbs, and have Slavonic and/or Turkish suffixes. Number and gender agreement are discussed, as are productive and unproductive suffixes and pleonasm.

scholarly journals Anticipating Words and Their Gender: An Event-related Brain Potential Study of Semantic Integration, Gender Expectancy, and Gender Agreement in Spanish Sentence Reading

2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. 1272-1288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Y. Y. Wicha ◽  
Eva M. Moreno ◽  
Marta Kutas
Keyword(s):  
Time Course ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Semantic Integration ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Brain Potentials ◽  
Preceding Article ◽  
Sentence Reading ◽  
Sentence Meaning ◽  
And Gender

Recent studies indicate that the human brain attends to and uses grammatical gender cues during sentence comprehension. Here, we examine the nature and time course of the effect of gender on word-by-word sentence reading. Event related brain potentials were recorded to an article and noun, while native Spanish speakers read medium to high-constraint Spanish sentences for comprehension. The noun either fit the sentence meaning or not, and matched the preceding article in gender or not; in addition, the preceding article was either expected or unexpected based on prior sentence context. Semantically anomalous nouns elicited an N400. Gender disagreeing nouns elicited a posterior late positivity (P600), replicating previous findings for words. Gender agreement and semantic congruity interacted in both the N400 window—with a larger negativity frontally for double violations—and the P600 window—with a larger positivity for semantic anomalies, relative to the prestimulus baseline. Finally, unexpected articles elicited an enhanced positivity (500–700 msec post onset) relative to expected articles. Overall, our data indicate that readers anticipate and attend to the gender of both articles and nouns, and use gender in real time to maintain agreement and to build sentence meaning.

Case and φ-feature agreement in advanced L2 Spanish grammars

2002 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 71-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florencia Franceschina
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Advanced Learners ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Functional Features ◽  
L2 Spanish ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
Case Number

One account of divergence in advanced L2 grammars is that speakers fail to acquire functional features in the L2 that are not part of the L1 inventory, and that this leads to non-native representations. Since this idea was first proposed by Hawkins and Chan (1997), few studies have provided the type of data which would allow for it to be adequately tested. This paper presents experimental data from two studies of the acquisition of Case, number and gender agreement in a group of advanced learners of Spanish who are L1 speakers of English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Portuguese. Differences were found between accuracy on Case and number agreement on the one hand, and gender agreement on the other, in ways predicted by the Failed Functional Features hypothesis.

scholarly journals Crosslinguistic evidence for the diminutive advantage: gender agreement in Russian and Serbian children

2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
NADA šEVA ◽  
VERA KEMPE ◽  
PATRICIA J. BROOKS ◽  
NATALIJA MIRONOVA ◽  
ANGELINA PERSHUKOVA ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
And Gender

Our previous research showed that Russian children commit fewer gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns than with their simplex counterparts. Experiment 1 replicates this finding with Russian children (N=24, mean 3;7, range 2;10–4;6). Gender agreement was recorded from adjective usage as children described animal pictures given just their names, varying in derivational status (diminutive/simplex), novelty, and gender. Experiment 2 extends the gender-agreement elicitation methodology developed for Russian to Serbian, a language with similar morphosyntactic structure but considerably fewer diminutives in child-directed speech. Serbian children (N=22, mean age 3;8, range 3;0–4;1), exhibited an advantage for diminutive nouns of almost the same magnitude as the Russian children. The fact that the diminutive advantage was found in a language with a low frequency of diminutives in the input suggests that morphophonological homogeneity of word clusters and membership in dense neighbourhoods are important factors that contribute to the reduction of inflectional errors during language development.

scholarly journals Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: a cross-sectional study

2001 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marc Dewaele ◽  
Daniel Véronique
Keyword(s):  
Individual Variation ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Sectional Study ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Psycholinguistic Variables ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Accuracy Rates

An analysis of 519 gender errors (out of 9,378 modifiers) in the advanced French interlanguage of 27 Dutch L1 speakers confirms earlier findings that gender assignment and/or agreement remain problematic for learners at all levels. A hypothesis derived from Pienemann's Processability Theory (1998a) that accuracy rates would be higher for gender agreement in structures involving no exchange of grammatical information between constituents was not confirmed. The analysis of interindividual and intra-individual variation in gender accuracy rates revealed effects from avoidance and generalisation strategies, from linguistic variables, sociobiographical variables and psycholinguistic variables. We argue that gender errors can originate at the lemma level, at the gender node level, or at the lexeme level. Different psycholinguistic scenarios are presented to account for intra-individual variation in gender assignment and agreement.

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