Optional and alternating case marking: Typology and diachrony

Chappell, Hilary; Verstraete, Jean‐Christophe

doi:10.1111/lnc3.12311

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 100 publications

(245 reference statements)

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“…While conditioned variation is common in languages of the world (e.g Labov, 1989;Aissen, 2003;Chappell & Verstraete, 2019;D'Arcy & Tagliamonte, 2015;Kroch & Small, 1978), there are also many circumstances in which variation is not conditioned but is inconsistent, as studied by Singleton and Newport (2004) and Hudson Kam & Newport (2005, 2009. However, questions about the nature of regularization in children learning from inconsistent input have not been further explored.…”

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confidence: 99%

Learning a Language from Inconsistent Input: Regularization in Child and Adult Learners

Austin

Schuler

Furlong

et al. 2021

Language Learning and Development

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When linguistic input contains inconsistent use of grammatical forms, children produce these forms more consistently, a process called "regularization." Deaf children learning American Sign Language from parents who are non-native users of the language regularize their parents' inconsistent usages. In studies of artificial languages containing inconsistently used morphemes, children, but not adults, regularized these forms. However, little is known about the precise circumstances in which such regularization occurs.In three experiments we investigate how the type of input variation and the age of learners affects regularization. Overall our results suggest that while adults tend to reproduce the inconsistencies found in their input, young children introduce regularity: they learn varying forms whose occurrence is conditioned and systematic, but they alter inconsistent variation to be more regular. Older children perform more like adults, suggesting that regularization changes with maturation and cognitive capacities.Learning a language is a daunting task. With little to no explicit instruction, young children must extract the relevant parts of the speech stream and learn the allowable combinations of sounds, words, and sentences. A central question is what biases and abilities allow children to learn a language so successfully. One mechanism hypothesized as part of this task is a sensitivity to the distributional statistics of the language environment. By tracking various statistics concerning the frequencies and co-occurrences of linguistic elements, young language learners can extract regularities at many levels, including phonology (

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confidence: 99%

Learning a Language from Inconsistent Input: Regularization in Child and Adult Learners

Austin

Schuler

Furlong

et al. 2021

Language Learning and Development

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“…Our survey was set within Chappell and Verstraete's (2019) typology on alternations and optionalities in case marking. It traced the extent of construction-based splits within the Nilotic language family of East Africa, where split ergative and marked nominative systems correlate with constituent order.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In their recent typology of alternations and optionalities in case marking, Chappell and Verstraete (2019) draw a four-way distinction between optional case marking, alternating case marking, referent-based splits and construction-based splits. The last category comprises case alternations that are "determined […] by differences in the larger construction in which the case marker occurs" (Chappell and Verstraete 2019: 11).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the case-marking phenomenon of interest here, by contrast, the presence or absence of case marking is first and foremost determined by the position of S/A arguments relative to the verb. Chappell and Verstraete (2019) offer their typology in an effort to distinguish types of case marking that often get conflated under the term 'differential' object/subject/argument marking, a vibrant area of current research (e.g., Fauconnier 2011; Mardale and Karatsareas 2020;Witzlack-Makarevich and Seržant 2018). Their primary focus is on 'optional' and 'alternating' case marking, and the role of constituent order in construction-based splits is only briefly mentioned.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Split case marking and constituent order in Nilotic languages

Mitchell,

Lorenzen,

Gertrud

et al. 2024

Preprint

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This paper presents a survey of split case marking across the Nilotic languages of East Africa. Expanding on König’s (2008) original insights, the survey is set within Chappell and Verstraete’s (2019) typology on alternations and optionalities in case marking, taking into account all accessible descriptions. It confirms the prevalence – and traces the extent – of a construction-based split, whereby only postverbal A (split ergative) or S/A (marked nominative) arguments receive case marking. Split ergativity is overall very rare; case is marked morphologically and the languages have a default OVA order. Marked nominative systems are more common; tonal inflection is the main marking strategy, and the default order is typically verb-initial. Languages without case marking have the default orders AVO or AOV, and do not have postverbal S/A arguments. The survey furthermore reveals an interaction with referent-based splits for some languages (where postverbal S/A arguments are obligatorily case-marked if they are animate, highly agentive and/or definite), and assembles all available information on factors that condition the construction-based split. On the basis of this survey and preliminary corpus-based investigations, we suggest that the concept of discourse prominence opens up a fruitful line for future research.

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“…In (i), the inanimate object un tren 'a train' is unmarked, while the animate object a un camarero 'a waiter' receives extra marking, in this case the preposition a. Symmetric DOM, on the other hand, involves different case marking of objects as in Finnish (see examples (1)-(3) discussed further on), which typically take different cases. A slightly different terminology is used by Chappell and Verstraete (2019), who distinguish between DOM (limited to symmetric DOM) and optional case marking (elsewhere called asymmetric DOM, see Iemmolo 2013). They define the two types of marking as follows: "optional case marking refers to the situation where a case marker can be present or absent in a particular environment without affecting role interpretation … Differential case marking … is defined here as referring to the situation where two overt case markers alternate in the same environment without affecting role interpretation. "…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond affectedness – partitive objects and degrees of agenthood in Ancient Greek

Luraghi

2022

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In several ancient and modern Indo-European languages, the partitive-genitive may be used in place of the accusative to encode the second argument of two-place verbs. In Ancient Greek the two types of object encoding can alternate with change-of-state verbs, alternation being viewed as connected with degrees of patient affectedness: the partitive-genitive encodes partially affected objects. Alternation also extends to experiential verbs, which are typically characterized by a low degree of transitivity and do not imply any change of state of the object-stimulus. Rather than concentrating on the implications of case alternation on the construal of the object, I consider the effects of variation on the whole construction, and argue that genitive vs. accusative marking of the object (NomGen vs. NomAcc constructions) reflects the construal of the subject-experiencer. While the different construal of the experiencer in terms of degrees of control cross-linguistically often results in non-nominative encoding of the experiencer, in Ancient Greek it is object encoding that affects the construal of the experiencer and reflects a scale based on possible control. The distribution of constructions with experiential verbs shows that NomAcc is typical of verbs of sight, thought, intellectual knowledge and emotions connected to sight and awareness, such as wonder and fear. NomGen is connected with touch, smell, taste, memory, forgetfulness, care and desire. In the in-between area, verbs of hearing, learning and verbs of affection may feature both accusative and genitive encoding, thus constituting a fuzzy transition area. The connection between sight and other experiential verbs that feature accusative encoding reflects an embodied conceptualization of experiential situations.

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Optional and alternating case marking: Typology and diachrony

Cited by 11 publications

References 100 publications

Learning a Language from Inconsistent Input: Regularization in Child and Adult Learners

Learning a Language from Inconsistent Input: Regularization in Child and Adult Learners

Split case marking and constituent order in Nilotic languages

Beyond affectedness – partitive objects and degrees of agenthood in Ancient Greek

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