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...

We argue that argument encoding systems that seem to involve three syntactic core cases (nominative/absolutive, ergative, accusative) are actually common ergative or accusative systems syntactically, with overt case markers for each of the two cases that disappear in intransitive contexts. Based on evidence from Kham, Djapu, Nez Perce, Upriver Halkomelem, Dyirbal, and Pitjantjatjara, we show th...

The article establishes a new generalization concerning domains from which extraction is possible. Taking as the starting point the well-known difference between NPs and VPs regarding extraction, where extraction from Complex NPs is not possible while extraction from Complex VPs is possible, the article argues that the former represents a pervasive pattern found in many contexts, the latter bei...

AUTHOR: Mary Laughren AFFILIATION: The University of Queensland ABSTRACT: Very much in the spirit of Goddard (1982), Julie Legate argues in a mkore recent article (Legate 2008) for a distinction in languages such as Warlpiri between a syntactic or abstract nominative and accusative case assignment as opposed to morphological case assignment, although this distinction is only morphologically rea...

this paper investigates the nature of absolutive case and the syntactic mechanisms underlying its licensing. to this end, two recent minimalist approaches to the syntactic derivation of ergative structure will be introduced. drawing on evidence from the syntactic derivation of clauses with intransitive complex predicates in kurdish, it will be established that the absolutive case is checked by ...

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 ...