Marking Topic or Marking Case: A Comparative Investigation of Heritage Japanese and Heritage Korean

Acquisition of Mulitiple Case Marking in Korean

This study investigates the nature of Nominative case in Korean, focusing on multiple Nom constructions, a phenomenon which has been the main source for differing views on Nom case. The study evaluates two opposing syntactic views of Nom case in Korean: default case approach vs structural case approach, by examining the time course of acquisition for relevant constructions using an experimental...

New Structural Patterns in Moribund Grammar: Case Marking in Heritage German

Research treats divergences between monolingual and heritage grammars in terms of performance-'L1 attrition,' e.g., lexical retrieval-or competence-'incomplete acquisition', e.g., lack of overt tense markers (e.g., Polinsky, 1995; Sorace, 2004; Montrul, 2008; Schmid, 2010). One classic difference between monolingual and Heritage German is reduction in morphological case in the latter, especiall...

Case marking and alignment

In (1) the syntactic functions of S (gizona ‘man’ in 1a) and O (mutila ‘boy’ in 1b) are identically coded, while in (2) it is S (muzhchina ‘man’ in 2a) and A (muzhchina in 2b) that are identically coded. That is, the two languages differ in whether S is aligned with A or O. Henceforth we refer to syntactic functions such as A, O, and S as argument roles. Argument structure has to do with the nu...

Overt Tail-Marking in Japanese

A topologic view of Topic and Focus marking in Italian

Regularities in position and level of prosodic prominences associated to patterns of Information Structure are identified for some Italian varieties. The experiments' results suggest a possibly new structural hypothesis on the role and function of the main prominence in marking information patterns. (1) An abstract and merely structural, “topologic” concept of Prominence location can be conceiv...