Subject and object

Incremental distinguishability of subject and object

The subject and the object in a transitive clause should be distinguishable. We discuss five different ways in which distinguishability can be obtained: (i) case morphology, (ii) agreement, (iii) selectional criteria of the verb, (iv) word order, and (v) prominence, in particular animacy. We argue that these different sources of information can be viewed as violable and potentially conflicting ...

Treasuring identity : subject-object relations in Beowulf

Subject-Object Asymmetries in Korean Sentence Comprehension

The Entropy Reduction Hypothesis (Hale, 2006) derives the subject-object asymmetry in Korean relative clauses. This asymmetry has been observed by Kwon, Polinsky, and Kluender (2006), among others. Agreement between the Entropy Reduction predictions and the available empirical data suggests that the heightened comprehension difficulty attested in object-extracted relatives is due to distinctive...

Subject Agreement, Object Agreement and Specificity in Swahili

Intonational correlates of Subject and Object realisation in Mawng (Australian)

A range of intonational devices can be used in the grammar of information and corrective focus marking in languages with relatively free word order. In this paper we explore whether nouns in the Australian Indigenous language Mawng are realised differently depending on syntactic function and focus. Results show that the pitch level associated with Subjects is higher in conditions of corrective ...