Subject-Verb Relation in North Dravidian Language

The main objective is to highlight some of the distinctive features pertaining to agreement phenomenon and language structure in Kisan. It is a agglutinative language having nominative-accusative case markings. The characteristics of an agglutinative language has gradually beenconverged with those of analytic language like Hindi and Odia which are the dominant languages of the region.

Why neither Russian nor Arabic will Become World Languages

This paper argues that classical languages, such as Arabic and Russian, are most unlikely to become spoken widely around the world, as has English. This is not to deny that Russia launched a sputnik into space in earlier times and currently is considered to be a super-power. Nor is there any intention to deny that the Russian language once functioned as a diplomatic language. Nor does the premise constitute a denial that Arabic is widely spoken in the Middle East and in some parts of Africa, and is recognised as a carrier of culture. But qualifying for a label of classical does carry a burden.These comments are not meant to denigrate either Russian or Arabic; they are classical languages in a sense that simplistic English will never achieve. Unlike English, Russian and Arabic both require a complexity of construction which entails strict adherence to building grammatical inflections on nouns, which is called case marking. While such case markings might be seen as concise, and perhaps even elegant word construction, this paper will argue that an over-fondness for expanding the basic words by building upon them case structures that are essentially semaphores to signal grammatical metadata, is antithetical to discourse in so much as it is a departure from simplicity.In order to demonstrate the likelihood of this paper’s premise being true concerning metadata overload at the word level, as is evident in case marking, the methodology is mixed in the sense that it seeks to establish a general probability of feasibility for the premise. This can be achieved through a brief demonstration of two languages which retain case, these being Arabic and Russian, against today’s English which jettisoned case in days of yore. Perhaps it is reasonable to suggest that this long-past jettisoning, of case and its overheads in favour of simplification of construction, has contributed to English success in becoming the accepted and widely-spoken world norm.

The emergence of functional case marking in initial varieties of Polish L2

This paper addresses the acquisition of L2 inflectional morphology after only a few hours of exposure. Eighty-nine participants with five different L1s and no experience of the L2 took part in a specially designed 14-hour L2 Polish course, during which they were tested on their developing morphosyntactic skills at various times. The present paper uses a Comprehension task and an Elicited Imitation task to probe learners’ ability to use nominative and accusative case markings to infer and express the subject and object. The study is designed to isolate variables such as the task employed to elicit L2 data, target sentence word order, time of exposure to the L2 input, and learners’ L1. The results show that while the majority of learners stick to a word order principle, some managed to identify and systematically apply the target-like use of inflectional morphology. Various intermediate strategies make it possible to identify a hierarchy of task difficulty. Both time of exposure and the learner’s L1 proved to be significant predictors of performance.

Case-marking idiosyncrasy in subordination: the Japanese dative ni and beyond

This article examines Japanese idiosyncratic dative case markings, which cannot be accounted for by the semantics of verbs per se. We argue that the underlying mechanism is best described in terms of “blending of prefabricated forms in language production” (Barlow 2000), demonstrating that the relevant prefabricated structures provide a scaffold for the development of the use of dative ni in question. This study further explores some comparable non-canonical case markings observed in Korean subordinate clauses, suggesting that they can also be similarly characterized.

Rise of canonical objecthood with the Lithuanian verbs of pain

The present paper aims to uncover the processes governing the rise of canonical case-markings. Experiencer verbs with the ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍStim case frame must necessarily first acquire canonical case marking on their second argument in order to enable the acquisition of the nominative by their first argument. The present paper concentrates, thus, on the acquisition of the accusative case by the second argument. Lithuanian verbs of pain are taken under scrutiny. I examine the change that leads to the acquisition of canonical objecthood, namely, the change from the original ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart case frame to the more canonical ᴅᴀᴛExp–ᴀᴄᴄBodyPart case frame. In the latter, the body-part argument not only acquires the canonical object marking, but also certain syntactic object properties as, for example, the obligatory change into genitive under negation. Strikingly, this change is only found with the verbs of pain skaudėti ‘to ache’ and dial. sopėti ‘to ache’ in Lithuanian, while other ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍStim experiencer verbs do not undergo this change. I argue that the rise of the canonical object with ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart verbs of pain in Lithuanian is due to some analogical processes internal to the semantic class of verbs of pain and not to a general drift leading to the acquisition of canonical case assignments. Verbs of pain represent a more complex subclass of experiencer verbs in that they typically take three arguments, namely, experiencer, body-part and stimulus. Those verbs that encode all three participants of the pain event as core arguments typically have the following case frame in Baltic: ɴᴏᴍStim–ᴅᴀᴛExp–ᴀᴄᴄBodyPart. I argue that the loss of the stimulus position by some of these triadic causal verbs of pain let them conflate semantically with the dyadic stative ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart verbs of pain. This semantic merger results in the redundancy of the morphosyntactic variation between ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart and ᴅᴀᴛExp-ᴀᴄᴄBodyPart which, in turn, leads to a generalization of one particularcase frame: ᴅᴀᴛExp–ᴀᴄᴄBodyPart in the standard language and ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart in some dialects.

Transitivity of Spanish perception verbs: a gradual category?

<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;" lang="EN-GB">This article examines to what extent perception verbs occurring in a syntactically transitive scheme are also semantically transitive. Indeed, since the perception process represents a mental rather than a physical contact between the perceiver/subject and the stimulus/object, it should be distinguished from the prototypical transfer of energy. It is shown that the semantic and conceptual differences between the perception modalities influence on the linguistic behaviour of Spanish perception verbs. In this perspective, the verbs <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ver</em> (<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to see</em>), <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">o&iacute;r </em>(<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to hear</em>), <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mirar </em>(<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to look at</em>) and <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">escuchar </em>(<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to listen to</em>) are ranged on a scale of transitivity. The validity of the elaborated hierarchy of transitivity is verified by means of empirical data. Based on a large corpus of infinitive constructions, it will be examined to what extent the position of a perception verb on the scale of transitivity correlates with the preferred case markings of its stimulus/object. A specific morphosyntactic phenomenon is studied, namely the special marking of the DO by the prepositional accusative.</span> <!--[endif] -->

Japanese two-year-olds use morphosyntax to learn novel verb meanings

ABSTRACTPrevious research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Göksun, Küntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument number and case markings in learning novel verbs. Children watched videos of novel causative and non-causative actions via Intermodal Preferential Looking. The novel verbs were presented in transitive or intransitive frames; the NPs in the transitive frames appeared ‘bare’ or with case markers. Consistent with previous findings of Morphosyntactic Bootstrapping, children who heard the novel verbs in the transitive frame with case markers reliably assigned those verbs to the novel causative actions.

La construcción infinitiva tras verbos de percepción visual y auditiva

In Spanish and Portuguese the direct perception of an event is expressed by infinitival constructions such as Vi a los niños correr and Vi os meninos correr(em) (“I saw the children run”). This article focuses on the factors that determine the syntactic markings of the perceived participant NP2 as the direct object of the perception verb or the subject of the subordinated infinitival complement. Based on a large corpus it is shown that although both languages prefer different basic word orders and case markings, a common cognitive-semantic parameter explains some striking analogies, namely the perception modality of the main verb. Moreover, the Portuguese infinitive optionally agrees with NP2, therefore syntactically becoming more subject-like. However, statistical data reveal beyond all expectations that inflection is not determined by the above-mentioned cognitive factor but by the degree of syntactic autonomy of the subordinated complement.

Resultatives in Korean Revisited: Complementation versus Adjunction

Korean resultatives are divided into two types depending on whether the subject of a resultative secondary predicate is assigned accusative case or nominative case. The former is comparable to selected object resultatives (e.g., Mary wipe the table clean), and the latter to unselected object resultatives (e.g., John screamed himself hoarse) in English. Korean resultatives have received a great deal of attention in the literature due to different case markings on the subject of a secondary predicate. However, there has been no agreement regarding whether Korean resultatives should be analyzed as small clause complements, similar to English, or adjunct phrases. Some argue that both resultative types are small clause complements (e.g., Kim 1999, Chang and Kim 2001), but some argue that only the selected object resultatives are true small clause type resultatives while the unselected object resultatives are VP adjuncts (e.g., Song 2005, Yeo 2006). A recent proposal by Shim and den Dikken (2007), however, suggests that both types should be analyzed as TP adjuncts. This paper defends the second position, a split analysis for the two types of resultatives: a complementation analysis for selected object resultatives, and an adjunction analysis for unselected object resultatives. Supporting evidence for the split analysis is provided by a few syntactic and semantic facts that lead to the conclusion that the two resultatives must be structurally distinguished from one another in terms of their complementhood/adjuncthood.