In Japanese potential and tough constructions, arguments standing in various semantic relations to a base verb can be marked with nominative case. Such subjects also may show up with genitive case in nominalizations irrespective of their semantic relations. This paper, addressing a variety of case alternations which have not hetherto attracted much attention from theoretical linguistics, propos...

In potential constructions in Japanese, any argument of a base verb, whether it is an argument, an adjunct or even an argument with no thematic relation to the verb, can be marked with nominative case. Addressing the problem of various types of case alternations as well as `ga-no' conversion, this paper argues for the existence of some semantically motivated mechanism licensing nominative and g...

Many Latin inflectional endings share material constituting less than a whole morpheme. Conventional linguistic analysis must either ignore the shared material (treating it as historical relics) or make it into morphemes through abstract morphophonemics, poorly motivated in Latin. The shared material contributes to economy of representation when the inflectional system is stored as a transition...

The Gradual Learning Algorithm (Boersma 1997) is a constraint-ranking algorithm for learning optimality-theoretic grammars. The purpose of this article is to assess the capabilities of the Gradual Learning Algorithm, particularly in comparison with the Constraint Demotion algorithm of Tesar and Smolensky (1993, 1996, 1998,2000), which initiated the learnability research program for Optimality T...