On morphological case and word-order freedom

The relationship between case marking and word order in languages has been a topic of extensive research in linguistics. Different languages employ various strategies to indicate grammatical roles and establish word order patterns. While the specific relationship between case marking and word order can vary across languages, there are some general tendencies that have been observed. According to Dryer (2013), in Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages, “case markers often function as the primary means of indicating grammatical relations”. On the other hand, languages with a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order tend to rely less on case marking and instead employ word order as the primary means of indicating grammatical relations. In SVO languages, the subject typically appears before the verb, and the object follows the verb. According to Lehmann (2015), “SVO languages have a relatively fixed word order and rely on position rather than marking to indicate grammatical relations”. Greenberg’s influential work on linguistic universals (1963) identified correlations between word order and case marking. He proposed the famous Greenberg’s Universals, which include statements such as “If a language has dominant SOV word order, it is always postpositional.” This finding suggests a strong connection between case marking and word order, supporting the hypothesis that certain word order patterns are associated with specific types of case marking systems. Furthermore, studies on specific language families have shed light on the relationship between case marking and word order. For instance, research on Indo-European languages, such as Latin and German, has explored how case markings contribute to the flexibility or rigidity of word order in these languages (Whitman 2008). Similar investigations have been conducted on other language families, including Finno-Ugric languages (Vilkuna 1989) and Austronesian languages (Chung 1998). By building upon the earlier literature, the current research expands our understanding of language universals and typological tendencies. The study described in the text utilizes large datasets from the World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS) to analyze the relationship between case marking and word order in a broader cross-linguistic context. By employing statistical techniques such as Pearson’s Chi-squared test, the research aims to address the following research question: Is there a discernible correlation between case marking and word order across diverse languages? The hypothesis posits that case marking plays a pivotal role in indicating the grammatical function of nouns in verb-ending languages. The datasets utilized are sourced from The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS), specifically Chapter 49 on the Number of Cases and Chapter 81 on the Order of Subject, Object, and Verb.

Conference on Comparative Diachronic Syntax, 2003

A familiar generalization: languages with rich case-marking have greater word-order freedom than those without. 1 (1) a. Puella girl: NOM puerum boy: ACC videt. seesThe girl sees the boy.'b. Puerum boy: ACC puella girl: NOM videt. seesThe girl sees the boy.'(2) a. The girl sees the boy. b. The boy sees the girl.

2018

This chapter describes neurolinguistic aspects of morphology, morphological theory, and especially morphological processing. It briefly mentions the main processing models in the literature and how they deal with morphological issues, i.e. full-listing models (all morphologically related words are listed separately in the lexicon and are processed individually), full-parsing or decompositional models (morphologically related words are not listed in the lexicon but are decomposed into their constituent morphemes, each of which is listed in the lexicon), and hybrid, so-called dual route, models (regular morphologically related words are decomposed, irregular words are listed). The chapter also summarizes some important findings from the literature that bear on neurolinguistic aspects of morphological processing, from both language comprehension and language production, taking into consideration neuropsychological patient studies as well as studies employing neuroimaging methods.

Language and Cognitive Processes, 2011

Second Language Research, 2011

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a ‘surface’ problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three experiments have been conducted, a cloze task, a sentence picture matching task and an on-line grammaticality judgement task, in order to investigate case morphology and its interaction with word order constraints. The findings of all three experiments point towards a variable use of case morphology, which is also observed in previous studies of Turkish as a second language (L2). Moreover, they show clearly that the learners face difficulties with non-canonical word orders as well as with the interaction of word order constraints and Case. On the other hand, the learners performed well on verbal inflections. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the developmental patterns in the early stages of L2 acquisition cannot be attributed to a global lack of functional categories but rather to more localized difficulties, which seem to be related to (a) whether the features in the L2 are grammaticalized in the first language and (b) the way these features are encoded in the morphosyntax of the first language. Moreover, we claim that processing factors and the specific properties of the morphological paradigms affect L2 development.

MMM 11 Online Processing, 2018

2013

Many studies discuss how morphological ambiguity influences processing. In particular, it is well known that attraction errors in subject-verb agreement are produced more often and cause smaller delay in comprehension if the form of the intervening noun coincides with the Nominative case form. This is the case in the German example die Stellungnahme gegen die Demonstrationen waren… 'the position against the demonstrations (Acc. Pl=Nom.Pl) were' as opposed to die Stellungnahme zu den Demonstrationen waren… 'the position on the demonstrations (Dat.Pl≠Nom.Pl) were'. However, the explanation of this phenomenon is a matter of debate. How are such errors produced or missed in comprehension, how are ambiguous forms represented so that they can influence this process?.. We offer a novel perspective on this problem by looking at novel data. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments exploring how Russian adjective forms ambiguous for case influence processing of case errors on the following nouns. We compare sentences containing errors like fil'my bez izvestnyh akterah 'movie. NOM.PL without famous. GEN.PL=PREP.PL actor. PREP.PL ' and fil'my bez izvestnyh akteram 'movie. NOM.PL without famous. GEN.PL≠DAT.PL actor. DAT.PL ' to grammatically correct sentences. Errors of the first type are detected later and their effect is less pronounced. The results help answering several questions that arise in connection with attraction errors in subject-verb agreement.

Proceedings of the 2004 LSK International Conference (Linguistic Society of Korea), 2004

The combinatoric nature of case particles as well as possible and impossible orders among different types of particles in Japanese is best accounted for by the theory of morphological case proposed by Marantz (1992).

English Language and …, 1999

Claims about the productivity of a given affix are generally made without differentiating productivity according to type of discourse, although it is commonly assumed that certain kinds of derivational suffixes are more pertinent in certain kinds of texts than in others. Conversely, studies in register variation have paid very little attention to the role derivational morphology may play in register variation. This paper explores the relation between register variation and derivational morphology through a quantitative investigation of the productivity of a number of English derivational suffixes across three types of discourse in the British National Corpus (written language, context-governed spoken language, and everyday-conversations). Three main points emerge from the analysis. First, within a single register, different suffixes may differ enormously in their productivity, even if structurally they are constrained to a similar extent.

The present study discusses psycholinguistic evidence for a difference between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology by investigating the processing of Finnish inflected and cliticized words. The data are derived from three sources of Finnish: from single-word reading performance in an agrammatic deep dyslec-tic speaker, as well as from visual lexical decision and wordness/learnability ratings of cliticized vs. inflected items by normal Finnish speakers. The agrammatic speaker showed awareness of the suffixes in multimorphemic words, including clitics, since he attempted to fill in this slot with morphological material. However , he never produced a clitic — either as the correct response or as an error — in any morphological configuration (simplex, derived, inflected, compound). Moreover , he produced more nominative singular errors for case-inflected nouns than he did for the cliticized words, a pattern that is expected if case-inflected forms were closely associated with their lexical heads, i.e., if they were paradigmatic and cliticized words were not. Furthermore, a visual lexical decision task with normal speakers of Finnish, showed an additional processing cost (longer latencies and more errors on cliticized than on case-inflected noun forms). Finally, a rating task indicated no difference in relative wordness between these two types of words. However, the same cliticized words were judged harder to learn as L2 items than the inflected words, most probably due to their conceptual/semantic properties, in other words due to their lack of word-level translation equivalents in SAE languages. Taken together, the present results suggest that the distinction between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology is psychologically real.