Andrej Malchukov

• Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

The chapter presents an overview of complex predicates in the individual language families of northern Asia, including Tungusic, Samoyedic (Uralic), Turkic, Mongolic, Yeniseian, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskaleut, Nivkh, as well as in Ainu, Japonic, and Koreanic. The focus of the chapter is on complex verbal predicates involving converbs, part...

In this brief discussion note I consider rise of (in)alienability splits in Tungusic languages in a typological perspective. I provide typological arguments for the diachronic scenario (originally due to Sunik 1947), in which the interrogative pronoun ƞüi ‘who’ developed nominalizing and deictic function, subsequently giving rise to free possessive...

This handbook explores multiple facets of the study of word classes, also known as parts of speech or lexical categories. These categories are of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and description, both formal and functional, and for both language-internal analyses and cross-linguistic comparison. The volume consists of five parts that inv...

Although semantic maps and typological hierarchies are different analytical tools and make different predictions, there is, arguably, a particular kind of a semantic map that shares certain features with typological hierarchies, in particular, the property of directionality. First, we briefly illustrate that such maps are based on the notion of loc...

The present paper discusses one of diachronic syntactic isoglosses in Northeast Asia. This study addresses in particular the process of renewal of finite verbal forms through non-finite forms, which is very prominent in different families in Northeast Asia (Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Japanese and Korean). It will be shown that the processes of ver...

The aims of this chapter are twofold. On the one hand, an analytic survey of the verbal categories across the Transeurasian language families, coached in general typological terms for better comparison. On the other hand, a selective discussion of the verbal domain, focusing on convergent developments across the individual families. Most of these s...

The chapter deals with complex constructions in the Transeurasian languages, including complement, relative, and adverbial clauses, as well as paratactic constructions. The dominant strategy of expressing subordinate clauses across the Transeurasian language families is the “deranking” strategy relying on nonfinite forms such as participles and con...

Ditransitive constructions in Yorùbá byJoseph Atoyebi, Martin Haspelmath and Andrej Malchukov. In: Andrej Malchukov, Martin Haspelmath and Bernard Comrie (eds.) Studies in ditransitive constructions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2010, 145-166.

Interest in non-canonically case-marked subjects has been unceasing since the groundbreaking work of Andrews and Masica in the late 70’s who were the first to document the existence of syntactic subjects in another morphological case than the nominative. Their research was focused on Icelandic and South-Asian languages, respectively, and since then...

The present article provides a typological commentary on the article by Nikki van de Pol (this issue) on the history of the English gerund. It is shown that in spite of certain idiosyncratic aspects, the history of the verbal gerund illustrates a well-known grammaticalization path of verbalization, whereby deverbal nouns are first grammaticalized i...

This volume surveys a variety of verb valency change phenomena among diverse languages and from diverse theoretical viewpoints. It offers typological studies comparing languages in topics like applicative polysemy, complex predicate formation and locative alternation, but also works describing the different valency-changing operations in specific l...

As any quick survey of the syntactic literature will show, there are almost as many different views of ergativity as there are so-called ergative languages (languages whose basic clause structure instantiates an ergative case-marking or agreement pattern). While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, resea...

The article presents a research program of the study of interaction of verbal categories couched in the tradition of St. Petersburg Typological School. The developed approach to syntagmatic interaction of verbal categories aims at integrating insights from the studies of typological markedness patterns with the work of V. S. Xrakovskij on dominant...

Axel Holvoet & Nicole Nau (eds.). Grammatical Relations and their Non-Canonical Encoding in Baltic. (Valency, Argument Realization and Grammatical Relations in Baltic, vol. 1). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ISBN: 9789027259097 (hardback), ISBN: 9789027270399 (e-book). The volume under review deals with variuos aspects of non-canonical ar...

The article presents a typological study of mood in interaction with other verbal categories, with special attention given to cases of syntagmatic interaction, when a mood grammeme excludes or reinterprets grammemes of other categories. Apart from providing a typological overview, the article serves to outline an approach to syntagmatic interaction...

This book examines the issue of competing motivations in grammar and language use. The term “competing motivations” refers to the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules and which speakers and addressees need to contend with when expressing themselves, or when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on...

The Oxford Handbook of Case provides a comprehensive account of research on case and the morphological and syntactic phenomena associated with it. The semantic roles and grammatical relations indicated by case are fundamental to the whole system of language and have long been a central concern of descriptive and theoretical linguistics. The book op...

This article addresses rare phenomena in case marking, focusing on those which are exceptional in terms of distribution or function. First, it deals with cases deviant in distribution, then explores functionally unusual cases. It shows that in most cases, the rise of cross-linguistically unusual patterns can be straightforwardly explained in terms...

The core function of the accusative case is to encode the affected participant in a transitive clause. Finnish is representative of a nominative-accusative language because it shows that Patient objects of canonical transitive clauses will be eligible for acc case marking. In many languages, acc marking extends beyond semantically transitive clause...

The sizes of case systems vary dramatically, from the minimal (two case) systems, to the large inventories exemplified by Daghestanian. An interesting question is whether there are any constraints on the types of possible case systems in the sense that availability of one case implies availability of another. The most concrete proposal of this kind...

It is probably true that cases which are restricted to one specific meaning are rarer than cases subsuming several meanings. The origins of these polysemies or syncretisms vary: some are conditioned by phonetic factors, especially pervasive in the situation when a case system collapses, others have a transparent semantic basis. A semantic map is a...

The aim of this article is to account for tense/aspect and mood based differential subject and object marking. We propose an analysis in terms of an optimization procedure between two general potentially conflicting constraints, the faithfulness constraint Identify, which requires the A and the P argument to be identified, either by case or by the...

In this paper I propose, building on an earlier work by Xrakovskij (Grammaticeskie kategorii glagola: Opyt teorii vzaimodejstvija, Nauka, 1996) and Aikhenvald and Dixon (Language 74: 56-80, 1998), a general approach to the study of grammeme interaction, focusing on functionally infelicitous grammeme combinations (such as perfective presents), and d...

In this paper I argue that semantic similarity is not the only factor which motivates polysemy patterns cross-linguistically; I also show that these other factors (markedness, distinguishability, etc) may give rise to polysemies which are problematic for established semantic maps. Only when these other interfering factors, both functional and struc...

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The semantics of natural gender in animate nouns is modeled in the framework of bidirectional Optimality Theory (OT). This allows for the interaction of lexical, conceptual and contextual constraints and for a straightforward treatment of the effect of blocking in this domain. Two versions of bidirectional OT are discussed and related to each other...

Two strategies of case marking in natural languages are discussed. These are defined as two violable constraints whose effects are shown to converge in the case of differential object marking but diverge in the case of differential subject marking. The discourse prominence of the case-bearing arguments is shown to be of utmost importance for case-m...

The present paper presents a cross-linguistic overview of animacy effects in (differential) case marking, and provides an explanation for the attested patterns in terms of two competing case marking strategies. It is argued that the complexity of animacy effects in differential case marking is due to the fact that some of these patterns result from...

In the early 1980s, Hopper and Thompson (1980) and Tsunoda (1981b), independently of each other, argued in favour of a prototype approach to transitivity in which transitivity is treated as a gradable and multi-factorial notion. A high or prototypical transitive clause correlates with the presence of a number of parameters, or in Tsunoda's terms sa...

We will provide a bidirectional Optimality Theoretic approach for fluid differential case marking, in particular fluid differential subject marking. Our claim is that although there is no fixed meaning associated with any particular type of case, a correspondence constraint between volitional meaning and ergative case interacts with markedness cons...

This monograph constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of reciprocal constructions and related phenomena in the world’s languages. Reciprocal constructions (of the type The two boys hit each other, The poets admire each other’s poems ) have often been the subject of language-particular studies, but it is only in this work that a truly glo...

The present article deals with constraints on transcategorial processes such as nominalization. In particular, it addresses the issue whether one can predict the order in which verbal categories are lost and nominal categories are acquired in nominalization. It is argued that the disruption/acquisition of categories in transcategorial processes is...

The three concepts of case, valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand, they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause, including case marking, person agreement and voice. On the other hand, they are related to several semantic issues such as the meaning of case, semant...

The three concepts of case , valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand, they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause, including case marking, person agreement and voice. On the other hand, they are related to several semantic issues such as the meaning of case, seman...

This chapter explores the formal relationships cross-linguistically found between adjectives in depictive function, and adjectives in other, arguably related functions (where 'adjective' is taken in a broad sense to include stative verbs, property nominals, participles, and relative clauses). The results are shown in the form of semantic maps, base...

This chapter focuses on verb splits in case-marking patterns and proposes a set of constraints that account for the cross-linguistic variation in case patterns for different verb classes. The transitive prototype is defined in terms of the role properties of its core arguments as well as the properties of the verb. While a canonical transitive cons...

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This book presents a collection of new typological exa...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.