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. ...

This paper analyzes the argument structure of Yucatec Mayan. In line with traditional assumptions but in contrast to more recent proposals, we show that Yucatec has ergative morphology but not a split-ergative system. For intransitive verbs there is a strict correlation between aspect and the type of linker: they take ergative clitics in the imperfect, but nominative suffixes in the perfect. Mo...

Legate (2008) proposes a class of ergative case marking systems, in which sole arguments of intransitives receive nominative case, transitive patients receive accusative case, and transitive agents receive ergative case. The system does not exhibit absolutive as a distinct case. The appearance of a single morphological case on both intransitive sole arguments and transitive patients is due to a...

introduction        a dialect is a variety of a language used by group of people whose lexicon, syntax, phonetics and phonology are different from those of other people. the existence of many geographical, economic and social barriers among the speakers of a language cause the emergence of many dialects. as such, each language has many dialects and accents and each dialect has many different ac...

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...

The linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH; a.k.a., Whorfian hypothesis) is reconsidered with respect to second language (L2) acquisition. With ebbs and flows over time, the notion of LRH went through dismissal and resurgence in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology. Empirical evidence gleaned from the pseudo-linguistic domains, such as color categorization, time perception, spatial cognitio...

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...

Basque weak quantifiers optionally agree with the inflected verb in number. This papers’ main aim is to study the dialectal variation shown by this phenomenon. The study will show that it is necessary to differentiate at least three systems: the western-central system, one that we will call the transition system, and the eastern system (souletin). The western-central system allows the presence ...

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 ...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between information flow and preferred argument structure across different text types. A number of studies in both ergative and accusative languages confirm Du Bois’ (1987) grammatical constrains. Chinese is neither an ergative nor accusative language. The results of my Chinese data do not truly confirm Du Bois’ constraints. Transitiv...