Edited by Leonid Kulikov, Andrej L. Malchukov and Peter de Swart
The three concepts of case, valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand, they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause, including case marking, person agreement and voice. On the other hand, they are related to several… read more
Acceptability judgements of syntactic island violations are often claimed to improve by either increasing the complexity of the wh-filler phrase or integrating the violating sentence into a discourse. In two acceptability judgement tasks, we looked at wh-island violations in Dutch by varying the… read more
We investigate how the lexical nature of weak definites influences the phenomenon of direct object scrambling in Dutch. Earlier experiments have indicated that weak definites are more resistant to scrambling than strong definites. We examine how the notion of weak definiteness used in this… read more
This paper takes a strictly empirical approach to the encoding of spatial notions in the four ancient Indo-European languages Ancient Greek, Latin, Gothic and Old Church Slavonic. By generating semantic maps on the basis of parallel corpus data, without any semantic pre-analysis, we use methods… read more
I show that two different motivations drive the differential case marking of direct objects cross-linguistically. On the one hand, direct objects can be marked to signal their markedness with respect to certain semantic features (local distinguishability). Opposed to this we find systems where… read more
In this chapter we discuss the role of Individuation on semantic role interpretation in the adpositional domain. Taking the findings of Aristar (1996, 1997) for the case domain as our starting point we examine whether similar observations can be made for the adpositional domain. On the basis of a… read more
