Linguistic cues may be considered a potent tool for focusing attention on causes or effects. In this paper, we explore how different cues affect causal assignments in German and Tongan. From a larger screening study, two parts are reported here: Part 1 dealt with syntactic variations, including word order (agent vs. patient in first/subject position) and case marking (e.g., as ergative vs. non-...

This paper offers a metalanguage to describe the nature of choosing the syntactic position of a causee in causative constructions, focusing on transitive constructions in nominative-accusative languages, with some comments on ergative languages. The generalization of Comrie's hypothesis about the causee's position is also given in terms of this metalanguage. Several statements pretending to be ...

Reciprocals are characterized by a crossover of thematic roles within a single clause. Their peculiar semantics often creates special argument configurations not found in other clause types. While some languages either encode reciprocals by clearly divalent, transitive clauses, or clearly monovalent, intransitive clauses, others adopt a more ambivalent solution. We develop a typology of valency...

Centering Theory is applied to a narrated film retelling in Kaqchikel Mayan in order to better understand discourse constraints on the form of referring expression. It is shown that Backwards Looking Centers are very often encoded by zero pronouns, and that center Shifts more often employ full pronouns and full noun phrases than do center Continues and Retains. Preverbal pronouns and full noun ...

for the western iranian languages the transition from the old iranian to the middle-iranian period is characterised by – among other things – the loss of word-final syllables. this loss had a far-reaching impact on the nominal and verbal systems since it caused the loss of categories which had been expressed by suffixes. the consequences include the emergence of the so-called ergative system. ...

I wish to present a codiication of syntactic approaches to dealing with ergative languages and argue for the correctness of one particular approach, which I will call the Inverse Grammatical Relations hypothesis. 1 I presume familiarity with the termèrgativity', but, brieey, many languages have ergative case marking, such as Burushaski in (1), in contrast to the accusative case marking of Latin...

This paper describes a number of verbal argument marking patterns found in the world’s languages and provides HPSG analyses for them. In addition to commonly-occurring variations of morphosyntactic alignment (e.g. nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive), this paper also presents analyses of more complex phenomena, including ergativity splits, Austronesianstyle focus-case systems, and direct...

Abstract In this paper, we propose treating alignment shift as a process of functional markedness reversal in the domain semantically transitive constructions. We illustrate how approach allows us to capture similarities between shifts Eskimo-Aleut and Western Austronesian languages, despite morphosyntactic differences their voice systems. Using three diagnostics (semantic transitivity, topic c...

In addition to the transitive and intransitive, ergative languages of the Polynesian group commonly have another type of construction, which is called middle. The middle construction stands somewhere in between the transitive and the intransitive. It involves two arguments, but crucially is syntactically intransitive. The subject appears in ABS, not ERG. The logical object appears in some obliq...