Contemporary grammars of Hausa (Newman, 2000; Jaggar, 2001) recognise three major classes within the set of prepositions: a restricted set of basic (true) prepositions, a set of complex prepositions, and a set of genitive prepositions. Among the set of 14 basic prepositions listed in Jaggar (2001), we find, inter alia, à ‘in, at, on etc.’, dàgà ‘from’, dà ‘with’, zuw `̄ a ‘towards’, ta ‘via, by ...

One of the most famous features of the Anatolian Indo-European languages is the widespread use of an inflected adjective (that agrees with its head noun in gender, number and case) in place of the genitive case. In some languages use of this adjective leads to total or near total loss of the genitive. Less well-known is the variety of exponents of the genitive case itself in Anatolian. The foll...

Possessive constructions in English, Spanish, and French differ in several ways. This article considers variation in word order, in the expression of agreement, and in the appearance of a preposition. The article generalizes to Spanish and French Bernstein & Tortora’s (2005) analysis of English possessive constructions, particularly the idea that the prenominal possessive constructions are dist...

Out of the two forms of genitive plural of the Ukrainian noun stat't'a ‘article’, namely stattej and statej, the former has been assumed to be purely Ukrainian, whereas the latter a Russified one. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the relationship is not necessarily as simple, moreover, that such an interpretation does not altogether answer the question of why only the form of genitive plu...

On the basis of 698 instances of Saxon genitive and of-construction, the present paper explores the use of these modifiers from a corpus-linguistic perspective. In particular, the influence of the lexical class of the modifier, the semantic relationship expressed by the constructions, and weight and syntactic complexity is analysed. It will be argued that the variation of genitive and of-constr...

This paper incorporates morphological markedness constraints into a framework in which morphology and phonology directly interact, modeled with interleaving of morphological and phonological constraints in serial OT (Wolf 2008, 2009). Morphological markedness constraints are constraints against realization (or spell-out) of morphologically marked feature sets. The empirical data motivating this...

The derivation of (1) seems rather straightforward. The wh-phrase fronts to Spec, PP, supporting the process that Henk so convincingly argued for in his 1978 book, and pied-pipes the PP to Spec, CP. Aissen (1996) proposes an analysis along these lines for Tzotzil. In essence, PP internal whmovement brings the wh-phrase high enough into the PP to enable successful checking of wh in Spec, CP, thr...

In our ongoing project called “In the Web of Words” (WoW) we aimed to create a complex search interface that incorporates a deep web search engine module based on a Hungarian question processor. One of the most crucial part of the system was the transformation of genitive relations to adequate SQL queries, since e.g. questions begin with “Who” and “What” mostly contain such a relation. The geni...

In this paper we examine the relationships among diathesis alternations, the semantics of verbs, and the referential status of NPs. Some diathesis shifts are argued to involve changes in the semantic type of NP arguments, including possible alternations between ‘referential’ NPs and ‘property-type’ NPs. We explore applications of this approach to alternations of Genitive and Accusative, both wi...

We present a small set of attachment heuristics for postnominal PPs occurring in full-text articles related to enzymes. A detailed analysis of the results suggests their utility for extraction of relations expressed by nominalizations (often with several attached PPs). The system achieves 82% accuracy on a manually annotated test corpus of over 3000 PPs from varied biomedical texts.