(1) a. Inflectional paradigms aspire to “avoid homophony”. The Russian nominative singular and genitive plural endings reflect a transderivational attempt to minimize homophony across inflectional endings. b. Inflectional paradigms require transderivational reference: one cannot compute the Russian genitive plural without knowing what the nominative singular ending is. c. Markedness-based neutr...

Similar Meaning Often a number of means (including various cases) are used to express a set of similar conceptswith overlapping or contiguous meanings. For example, Russian has many ways to expressdirectionality in the domain of intention (many of which are roughly equivalent to English ‘for’),among them the prepositions v, na, pro, and za with the accusative case, do, dlja, radi wi...

This paper isolates the syntactic and semantic models of temporal genitive with meaning identification – localization (simultaneity successiveness) quantification, specifically quantification in narrow sense (longitudinality, terminativeness ingressiveness) frequency (regularity). It further typical meanings expressed by genitive: direct without awareness passing time, presence processuality ma...

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 ...

In sentence comprehension research, the case system, which is one of the subsystems of the language processing system, has been assumed to play a crucial role in signifying relationships in sentences between noun phrases (NPs) and other elements, such as verbs, prepositions, nouns, and tense. However, so far, less attention has been paid to the question of how cases are processed in our brain. ...

1 Introduction The familiar paradigm of Latin first declension nouns in (1) illustrates case syncretism: although at least five cases are recognised, neither the singular nor the plural has five distinct forms: in the singular the genitive and dative are identical, and in the plural the dative and ablative are identical.

This study charts the development of the genitive masculine inflection, one of the most irregular parts of the Polish case-marking system. 72 Polish children aged from 2;3 to 10;8 participated in a nonce word production experiment testing their ability to supply the genitive form and their sensitivity to the semantic factors determining the choice of ending. Results indicate that productivity, ...