Case inversion in Georgian Syntactic Properties and Sentence Processing

The morphological and syntactic facts from Georgian create a unique puzzle for the study of sentence processing. The word order is characterized by considerable freedom and case marking is not uni-directionally associated with θroles. This article presents a grammatical account of Georgian case marking and a study on incremental sentences processing. The empirical findings show that case is indeed a more reliable cue than word order in processing clauses with thematically ambiguous arguments. Furthermore, the obtained data suggest an asymmetry between dative experiencers and dative actors, such that only the revision of the thematic properties of the latter is associated with high processing cost.