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...

Accounts of clause-level phenomena such as inversion and obviation (Aissen 1997, 1999) make crucial reference to the relative ranking of two arguments, subject and direct object, on a person/animacy/discourse hierarchy. Are such pair-wise comparisons ever required within the NP? O’Connor (1999a,b) proposed an analysis of NP-internal case-marking of possessors in Northern Pomo that paralleled Ai...

English provides several distinct mechanisms by which verbs may be nominalized, as illustrated in (1-2). The form electing in (1a) is sometimes termed the “verbal” gerund, while the perfectly homophonous form in (1b) is termed the “nominal” gerund. Nominal gerunds in English are distinguished from verbal gerunds syntactically, by their inability to assign objective case to an object (hence the ...

1. Introduction The Swahili object marker (OM) is a verbal prefix that agrees with an object of the verb. In Swahili there is no semantic or lexical class of objects for which object marking is obligatory, nor is there any class for which it is impossible. The numerous earlier studies of the object marker have discovered no hard and fast rules for its distribution. Its usage has been found to c...

Ergativity refers to patterning in a language whereby the subject of a transitive clause behaves differently to the subject of an intransitive clause, which behaves like the object of a transitive clause. Ergativity can be manifested in morphology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse organisation. This article overviews what is known about ergativity in the world’s languages, with a particular focus...

OBJECTIVES This article examines how mentally ill people are perceived by psychology students. It was inspired by a study on stereotypical perception of mentally ill people carried out 10 years ago, which was published in Polish Psychiatry (2000). METHODS A modified version of the semantic differential, which was used 10 years ago, was applied. The version consisted of: subject selection of 3...

Two major mechanisms of encoding telicity across languages are either marking the object as exhaustively countable or measurable, or utilizing a specific prefix on the verbal form. English predominantly uses the first mechanism, while Russian mostly utilizes the second. The learning task of an English speaker acquiring Russian, then, is two-fold: to learn each individual verb with its subset of...

In (1a), the verb shows subject agreement with 'Alemu (3sm)' and object agreement with 'the dead cat (3sm)'. Probably due to the strong verbal agreement, a null pronominal (‘pro’) can be used as the subject (or the object), as in (1b). Besides agreement-marking, Chaha verbs host prefixes to yield transitivity alternations, passivization, and causativization. Hetzron’s (1977) summary of the thre...

Not all spatial adjuncts behave alike. In some languages, certain display different marking or combinatorial possibilities than others. Recent functional-typological studies make two claims about this differential place phenomenon: (1) it is primarily motivated by noun semantics, opposing names and other nouns; (2) realized as a contrast between zero-marking overt of adjunct function. We evalua...

Previous work on object classification preferences shows that speakers of languages that lack morphological plural marking (like Yucatec and Japanese) display a tendency to match objects by common material, while speakers of languages with morphological plural marking (like English) display a tendency to match objects by common shape. The present paper compares categorisation preferences of Eng...