It is well known that Romanian is a language which marks its direct objects differentially by means of the particle pe (Niculescu 1965, Chiriacescu 2007, von Heusinger & Onea 2008). As in other Romance languages, direct object case marking is obligatory for some objects, optional for others and excluded for a third set, whereas this phenomenon is mostly accompanied by clitic doubling. The facto...

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 an...

1. Introduction The evolutionary scenario as a model for linguistic change has become more prominent in recent years (Croft 2000, Haspelmath 1999, Kirby 1999). The principled idea behind the evolutionary scenario is quite straightforward: change operates on the basis of variation between available linguistic options and the selection of options in the course of speakers' use, such that particul...

Alienable possessive constructions in Biakic stand out with respect to the South Halmahera-West New Guinea language family which they belong. This article investigates origins of innovative alienable forms Biakic, constitutes an example grammaticalization from predicative attributive possession. It describes marking possession for each four languages, examining form markers, their position poss...

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether early bilingual Basque-Spanish speakers, who acquired Spanish by the age of 5, comprehend Spanish wh-dependences as effortlessly as native Spanish speakers. Given that Basque and Spanish are structurally different languages, we hypothesized that predictive processing strategies from the first language (L1) would interfere with predictive...

Since Bossong (1985), referential hierarchies have proven useful in accounting for patterns of differential object marking (DOM) in monotransitive clauses. More recent studies (Siewierska 1998; Haspelmath 2005; Bickel 2008; papers in this volume) have also shown the relevance of such hierarchies in explaining the alignment patterns of ditransitive verbs – that is, how languages treat formally t...

Categorizing visual elements is fundamentally important for autonomous mobile robots to get intelligence such as novel object learning and topological place recognition. The main difficulties of visual categorization are two folds: large internal and external variations caused by surface markings and background clutters, respectively. In this paper, we present a new object categorization method...

Two dolphins carrying cameras swam in the ocean as they searched for and marked mine simulators - buried, proud or moored. As the animals swam ahead of a boat they searched the ocean. Cameras on their harness recorded continuous sound and video. Once a target was detected, the dolphins received a marker to take to the simulator's location. During search and detection, dolphins made almost conti...

As given in the raising (2a) and causative (2b), the Num-CL sey myeng ‘three CL’ can have a different case marking from its antecedent, functioning as the matrix object. In a sense, it is linked to the original grammatical function of the raised object and the causee, respectively. Central issues in deep-parsing numeral classifier constructions thus concern how to generate such FQ constructions...

Yet their theoretical account in some more prominent modern syntactic theories, including Principles and Parameters (P&P; Chomsky 1995 and references therein) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard and Sag 1987, 1994), seems to be problematic. Both theories assume a clear distinction between raising to subject (SR) and so-called Exceptional Case Marking (ECM; here called raisin...