This paper has as its aim to connect two seemingly disparate phenomena: the structure of Basque adpositional phrases and the synchretisms arising in plural DPs between ergative and absolutive arguments in some of the dialects of Basque. This synchretism, which can be found in western and central dialects of Basque, resolves in favour of absolutive marking, and has been taken to be the product o...

In rural Tanzania, recent major influences happen between Kiswahili and English to ethnic languages rather than ethnic languages, which had been in contact for so long, influencing each other. In this work, I report the results of investigation of lexical changes in indigenous languages that aimed at examining how ethnic communities and their languages, namely Cushitic Iraqw, Nilotic Datooga, N...

This paper considers the notorious Double Nominative Constructions (DNCs) found in Korean, and argues that these constructions are derived from a locative construction. Based on Freeze (1992) and Perlmutter (1978), I will show that the derivation in Korean DNCs is the same as that found in English possessive, existential and locative sentences (see Fillmore (1968), Kuno (1971) and Lyons (1967) ...

We analyze Case in terms of independent constraints on syntactic structures — namely, the Projection Principle (inherent Case), the ECP (marked structural Case), and the theory of extended projections (the nominative, a Caseless nominal projection). The resulting theory accounts for (1) the government constraint on Case assignment, (2) all major Case systems (accusative, ergative, active, three...

The acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (Atay, 2010; Can, 2009; Chay, 2006, & Kras, 2007, among others). In the present study, ‘Predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. There are three English verb-types which seem to be more problematic for Persian EFL learners: (a)...

A tool introduced by Rastier (and based on Sowa, 1984), the semantic graph can be used to represent any semantic structure in terms of semes and the relations between them. The semes are the nodes of the semantic graph (shown in boxes or brackets) and the relations are the links (shown in ellipses or parentheses). The arrows indicate the direction of the relation between nodes. Most semantic st...