Accounts of clause-level phenomena such as inversion and obviation (Aissen 1997, 1999) make crucial reference to the relative ranking of two arguments, subject and direct object, on a person/animacy/discourse hierarchy. Are such pair-wise comparisons ever required within the NP? O’Connor (1999a,b) proposed an analysis of NP-internal case-marking of possessors in Northern Pomo that paralleled Ai...

This paper investigates an alternation found with definite noun phrases in direct object position in Romanian that represents a theoretical puzzle for current theories of Differential Object Marking or pe-marking (Dobrovie-Sorin 1994). When in direct object position and unmodified, definite noun phrases can be accompanied either by the differential object marker pe, or by the simple enclitic de...

Parsing strategies in temporarily ambiguous sentences were investigated in readers with different sentence memory capacities using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Readers with a high memory span as well as readers with a low memory span were required to read subject and object relative sentences which were either ambiguous until the last word (late disambiguation) or were disambiguated b...

Abstract This article explores the relationship between affectedness and Differential Object Marking (DOM) of indefinite direct objects in Turkish Uzbek. We argue that distribution DOM two Turkic languages is determined by objects’ specificity animacy as nominal semantic properties, a verbal property associated with object. provide original empirical evidence from forced-choice studies investig...

Ergativity refers to patterning in a language whereby the subject of a transitive clause behaves differently to the subject of an intransitive clause, which behaves like the object of a transitive clause. Ergativity can be manifested in morphology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse organisation. This article overviews what is known about ergativity in the world’s languages, with a particular focus...

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a developmental language disorder characterised by morpho-syntactic errors in the absence of neurological trauma, cognitive impairment, psycho-emotional disturbance, or motor-articulatory disorders. Among the hypotheses that have argued for SLI as an impairment at the linguistic level, rather than at the cognitive or perceptual level, there is a debate as t...