Focus case outside of Austronesian: An analysis of Kolyma Yukaghir

Abstract

Case is traditionally approached as a lexical phenomenon in HPSG. The LinGO Grammar Matrix customization system, an HPSG-based grammar engineering toolkit and also a typological meta-resource, includes several options for case assignment, and one of them, ˋfocus case', assumes that case of the participants in basic clauses is handled via lexical rules rather than lexical entries. This phenomenon was previously only attributed to a group of Austronesian languages, and thus the focus case differed from all other case options in the Matrix which were attested for across language families. Our analysis of Kolyma Yukaghir, a nearly extinct language of North-Eastern Russia, shows that focus case can be successfully used outside of Austronesian family and therefore that the option is more universal than it was previously thought.

20 years of the Grammar Matrix: cross-linguistic hypothesis testing of increasingly complex interactions

“…To document the analysis that has come from this course, many of the resulting grammar specifications, test suites, and grammar frag- [ 116 ] ments are available via Language CoLLAGE . In addition, some grammars from the class have resulted in publications focussed on testing specific hypotheses, such as analyzing Kolyma Yukaghir [yux] (isolate) as having focus case (Zamaraeva and Bender 2014) and suggesting a previously unconsidered negation strategy in Nanti [kox] (Arawakan) (Inman and Morrison 2014).…”