Reading Quiz Qns

1. There are languages in the world that do not have …
   1. case marking
   2. basic constituent order
2. Which of the following constituent orders is not attested in the world’s languages?
   1. NONE
3. Which type of constituent order is most common crosslinguistically?
   1. SOV
   2. then SVO
4. Case is generally considered to be a property of …
   1. Case is generally considered to be a property of an entire noun phrase , rather than just the head noun itself.
5. Which of the following categories is least likely to be involved in agreement?
   1. case
   2. Cross-linguistically, the most common categories involved in agreement are per- son , number and gender (= noun class) and, much more rarely, case. We will see that verb agreement can follow an accusative or an ergative pattern even when there’s no actual case marking on the NPs themselves.

Grammatical Relations inside the clause

how to indiciate relatiosnhip between the NPs and the verb predicate

1. ORDER: constituent order
2. CASE: case marking (e.g. Latin which doesn’t have a fixed position for the NPs)
3. AGREEMENT: verb agreement/cross referencing
   1. e.g. Kambera: free pronouns dont exist, markers are only used for emphasis or disambiguation

Constituent order within the clause

There are $3! = 6$ orderings of ${V, S, O}$ and they all exist in world languages

Basic vs Marked Constituent orders

• BASIC:
  • May have multiple of them
    • Different order for the same clausal tyeps
• MARKED:
  • Special orderings used to highlight a particular constituent
  • e.g. Different order for root clause and subordinate clauses.
• FREE: No ordering, rely on case marking and/or to show grammatical relations
  • Free Constituent order
  • Free Word order: constituents themselves can be broken up

Case/Agreement Systems

Argument types

• S [Sole]: Subject of intransitive verbal pred
• A [Agent]: Subject of transitive verbal pred
• P [Patient]: Object of transitiveee verb pred

Alignments

• S+A [Nominative] / P [Accusative]
• S+P [Absolutive] / A [Ergative]
• Tripartite
• Note that A+P/S will never occur as A+P always co-occurs, rendering marking useless as it fails to differentiate.

Morphological alignments: the alignments are demonstrated by morphological changes to the roots

Syntatic alignments: the alignments are demonstrated by application of syntactic phenomena (e.g. unexpressed arg) to the arguments

Systems

Case system: Markings on the arguments pattern according to S+A/P or S+P/A

Agreement system: Markings on the predicate pattern according to S+A/P or S+P/A

Splits

Split case system: case is marked according to one alignment in some environments and another in others.

Split intransitive system:

• patterning of intransitives is decided by the level of volition
  • High volition (where S behaves semantically like an Agent): “drink”, “swim”, “sat” adopts S+A/P = $S_A$.
  • Low volition (where S behaves semantically like an Patient): “blushed”, “fell”, “died” adopts S+P/A = $S_P$.

Split morphological system: Ergative case sys + Accusative agreement sys (None of the inverse found)