A Computational Treatment of Differential Case Marking in Malayalam

Case is often treated as an uninteresting part of computational processing (both parsing and generation). In the mainly free word order South Asian languages, case plays a theoretically well established role in syntactic and semantic processing. Case is used not only to help identify grammatical relations (e.g., ergatives indicate subjects), but also contributes significantly to the semantic analysis of a clause. This paper extends Butt and King’s (2001) computational treatment of case in the IndoEuropean language Urdu to the Dravidian language Malayalam. The data from Malayalam confirms Butt and King’s general approach, by which case markers add requirements about the syntactic structure and the semantic analysis of the clause via individual lexical entries. In particular, the paper proposes a computational treatment of the expression of modality via differential subject case marking.