Linker inventories, linking splits and lexical economy

Is There Any Need for the Concept of Directional Syncretism?

“…Universally, a gap in the ergative is more likely for animates than for inanimates, while a gap in the accusative is more likely for inanimates. This is also predicted by the framework of harmonic alignment within OT (Aissen (1999), Stiebels (2000)). If one wants to account for the situation where the realization of case is determined by values of animacy, the morphological scale in (2-a) (Stiebels (2000, 237)) and the semantic scale in (2-b) represent the relevant pieces of information to start from.…”

Argument hierarchy and other factors determining argument realization

“…It would not be adequate to describe the global effects as dependencies in a semantic sense; they always follow from two simple global constraints, namely DEFAULT ('Each case pattern should include nominative') and UNIQUENESS ('No case should appear more than once in a pattern') (Stiebels 2000, Wunderlich 2003, and mostly result in a less specified case for another argument. For instance, the feature [+hr] for the higher argument turns the canonical pattern <nom, acc> into <dat, nom> rather than <dat, acc> because of DEFAULT.…”

“…8 With the respective case specifications in (31) the case assignments attributed to the argument roles in (30) turn out to be optimal, hence canonical. Note that there is a general asymmetry involved: it is better to mark a lower argument than a higher one (Stiebels 2000(Stiebels , 2002.…”

“…(39) Harmonic alignment in the presence of morphological factors (Stiebels 2000(Stiebels , 2002 a. Morphological features:…”

Grammatiktheorie und Empirie in der germanistischen Linguistik

“…"abhängiger Kasus"), folgt dies unmittelbar (vgl. Marantz 1991;Bittner & Hale 1996;Wunderlich 1997;Stiebels 2000;McFadden 2004;Schäfer 2012a;Preminger 2014;Baker 2015und Bobaljik 2015; in diesem Fall müsste die Kasusabsorption dann kein lexikalischer Prozess mehr sein. Diese Fragen sind für unsere gegenwärtigen Zwecke aber orthogonal, und wir sehen im Folgenden von der Option von abhängigem Kasus ab.…”