Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Andrej L Malchukov, Marc D Richards (Eds.) Scales and Hierarchies Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs Editor Volker Gast Editorial Board Walter Bisang Jan Terje Faarlund Hans Henrich Hock Natalia Levshina Heiko Narrog Matthias Schlesewsky Amir Zeldes Niina Ning Zhang Editor responsible for this volume Volker Gast Heiko Narrog Volume 277 Scales and Hierarchies A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective Edited by Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky Andrej L Malchukov Marc D Richards ISBN 978-3-11-034400-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-034413-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039500-6 ISSN 1861-4302 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston Typesetting: RoyalStandard, Hong Kong Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Table of contents Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Andrej L Malchukov and Marc D Richards Introduction Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich & Taras Zakharko Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on case alignment Martin Haspelmath Descriptive scales versus comparative scales Martin Cysouw Generalizing Scales Stefan Keine and Gereon Müller Differential Argument Encoding by Impoverishment Jochen Trommer Ø-Agreement in Turkana Marc D Richards Defective Agree, Case Alternations, and the Prominence of Person Petr Biskup and Gerhild Zybatow Prefixes, Scales and Grammatical Theory 45 59 75 131 197 Jakob Hamann Argument Encoding in Direction Systems and Specificity-Driven 227 Agree Andrej L Malchukov 10 Towards a typology of split ergativity: A TAM-hierarchy for alignment 275 splits 11 Corinna Handschuh Split Marked-S Case Systems 297 Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Matthias Schlesewsky 12 Scales in real-time language comprehension: A review Subject index 353 321 173 Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Andrej L Malchukov, and Marc D Richards1 Introduction Since the discovery of scales (or hierarchies) for grammatical categories in the 1970s, many cross-linguistic generalizations have been noted in the functionaltypological literature, especially in such domains as person/number marking, argument encoding by case or agreement (Silverstein 1976, Dixon 1979), diatheses and direction marking (Comrie 1981, DeLancey 1981), as well as in other domains (Keenan & Comrie’s (1977) Accessibility Hierarchy for relativization being a celebrated example) The formulation of scales as “implicational hierarchies” has enabled researchers in this area to formulate some of the most robust generalizations about language More recently, the concept of scales has received considerable attention in grammatical theory as well In particular, the work of Aissen (1999, 2003), framed within Optimality Theory (OT), has triggered a surge of research occupied with the question of how the effects of scales are related to general principles of morphosyntactic theory Furthermore, recent work in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic theorizing has argued for cross-linguistic principles of language processing which employ the notion of a scale The idea is that scales may help to guide incremental argument interpretation by serving to shape the interpretive relations that are established between different arguments online (Bornkessel & Schlesewsky 2006) As successful as this general approach has been, a number of empirical and theoretical issues surrounding the notion of scale or hierarchy remain unresolved and, indeed, the subject of some controversy In particular, we might identify the following three groups of questions as they pertain to different areas of linguistic research: (i) Typological/functional: How well-established is the cross-linguistic evidence for implicational scales? Various potential counter-examples have been discussed in the recent literature (see Filimonova 2005) This question becomes especially pressing as the availability of large databases (WALS, TDS) and recent comprehensive fieldwork studies promise a better understanding of the relevant empirical generalizations At the same time, we might ask whether there is evidence for new scales that have so far gone unnoticed And how are scales Editors listed in alphabetical order The research reported and collected in this volume was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and carried out as part the Leipzig-based research group (Forschergruppe 742), Grammar and Processing of Verbal Arguments, of which the majority of the authors of the subsequent chapters were members The opening five paragraphs of this introduction were written collaboratively by the members of this research group Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Andrej L Malchukov, and Marc D Richards best represented? Are they, for example, organized in a meta-hierarchy with respect to each other? (ii) Formal/theoretical: What is the status of scales in grammatical theory? Are they part of grammar itself (Noyer 1992, Aissen 1999, 2003), or are they epiphenomenal? If the latter, are they epiphenomena of (a) functionality or frequency distributions in language use (Bresnan, Dingare & Manning 2001, Newmeyer 2002, Hawkins 2004, Haspelmath 2008), or (b) other grammatical mechanisms such as feature geometries and/or syntactic movement (Harley & Ritter 2002, Bejar 2003)? In terms of phrase structure, we might seek to determine the relation between feature hierarchies and the order of functional projections in the syntax (Cinque 1999, Starke 2001) (iii) Psycholinguistic/neurolinguistic: What role scales play in the language processing architecture? Should they be afforded independent status or can they be viewed as epiphenomena of other information types (e.g frequency of occurrence)? How can scales be modeled in a neurobiologically plausible manner? This edited volume raises and addresses these questions in eleven papers by leading international scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, shedding new light on the nature of referential hierarchies, their empirical foundation and validity, and the ways in which they can be incorporated into theoretical accounts of a wide range of linguistic phenomena In so doing, the volume represents the state of the art in the linguistic study of referential scales On the methodological side, this volume brings together functional-typological, descriptive, quantitative/computational, formal and psycholinguistic approaches to the discussion of these important topics From a theoretical point of view, these various approaches to the topic of scales reflect a wide range of opinions and perspectives on the material, particularly on the questions of how scales should be represented and at what level (if at all) they provide useful linguistic generalizations Crucially, these different perspectives are presented with a coherent empirical focus Firstly, the volume is inherently cross-linguistic in orientation, independently of the perspective adopted in the individual contributions (grammatical theory, typology, computational linguistics, processing) While the scale of the cross-linguistic comparison ranges from case studies in a small number of related languages (e.g Russian versus Czech in the chapter by Biskup and Zybatow) to large-scale typological studies in areally stratified samples (over 460 languages in the contribution by Bickel, Witzlack-Makarevich and Zakharko), the contributions share a commonality of purpose in all aiming to provide cross-linguistically tenable solutions to the research questions raised above Secondly, cross-fertilization among the individual contributions is furthered Introduction by the focus on various aspects of differential argument encoding as a key unifying phenomenon The volume opens with three articles that cast various degrees of caution and doubt on the ways in which scales are usually employed Balthasar Bickel, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Taras Zakharko’s contribution reviews the typological evidence to question the empirical validity of Silverstein-type generalizations as universal scales determining the distribution of case-marking patterns Rather, they argue that areal and historical factors may provide a better explanation for the attested systems Martin Haspelmath then makes the case for distinguishing between at least two notions of scales, which, in turn, are claimed to be derivative from the distinction between descriptive (languageparticular) categories, and comparative (cross-linguistic) concepts The author argues that once this distinction is acknowledged, it can also resolve the problem of exceptions to universal scales, where particular reference is made to person-animacy scales A computational perspective on scale representation is provided by Michael Cysouw, who argues that the concept of scale can be generalized to cover any restriction on form-function mapping and can be conceived, in its most general form, as a dissimilarity matrix This naturally leads to the conclusion that one-dimensional scales have to be discarded in favor of multidimensional ones, which lend themselves to analysis by computational techniques designed for capturing similarities, such as multidimensional scaling He illustrates this approach by way of inchoative-causative alternations, where different lexical items show different encoding similarities across languages The following five chapters (Chapters 5–9) focus on the theoretical status of scales from a variety of formal perspectives Stefan Keine and Gereon Müller take issue with certain aspects of Aissen’s influential optimality-theoretic account of differential case-marking, in particular its limitation to zero-nonzero alternations They suggest a revision based on impoverishment, that is, the postsyntactic deletion of morphosyntactic features Couched within the framework of Distributed Morphology, their paper thus provides a morphological solution to the effects of the animacy hierarchy on case marking Also adopting a morphological perspective on differential argument encoding, Jochen Trommer then addresses a non-canonical case of direct-inverse marking (“Quirky Inverse Marking”) in the agreement system of Turkana, an eastern Nilotic language, and proposes a more restrictive formalism for morphological spellout than those based on harmonic alignment (cf Aissen 1999, 2003) In contrast to Keine and Müller’s account, Trommer bases his proposal on the assumption that zero realization is the only kind of morphological hierarchy effect The remaining three chapters adopting a formal perspective investigate the nature of scales from a more syntactic point of view As noted by Carnie (2005), 342 Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Matthias Schlesewsky stochastic firing behaviour of the network This is illustrated schematically in Figure 2A, while Figure 2B illustrates the transition from a spontaneous stable network state with a low firing rate to a decision state with a high firing rate The decision states in Figure can essentially also be viewed as states that allow for a categorisation, for example of an entity as an actor We could assume, then, that an attractor network for actor categorisation exists independently of language and that, as a result of the general human ability to recognise goal-directed action and to differentiate between self and other, it is universal The stable firing patterns inherent to this network will be based on sets of input features that co-occur in domain-general actor recognition The linguistic actor category overlaps to a certain degree with these general features (e.g via the features +human, +animate and +1st person), thus leading to a propensity for actor recognition via the general attractor network With regard to more language-specific features (e.g case marking), the system will learn that these correlate with the remaining actor features such that, in the mature system, they also push the network towards the actor recognition attractor state (for further discussion, see also Alday et al., 2014).13 In summary, the notion of actor as a cognitive and neural attractor category can account for the importance of this category in cross-linguistic language comprehension It is also compatible with the variation described in the preceding section: for the purposes of producing an attractor state within the network, it appears natural that the overlap between a linguistic actor and acting agents in general will be conditioned by language-specific properties, e.g the strength of a particular cue for determining actorhood In addition, attractors have the advantage that they naturally allow for exceptions: they are stable, but not irreversible states in a non-deterministic system Thus, in contrast to linguistic universals in the traditional sense, they provide a possible explanation for why some patterns occur frequently in the languages of the world while nevertheless not being exceptionless.14 13 In this context, one might ask whether the actor category is, in fact, one that emerges as a result of the interplay between general cognitive properties and the properties of the language being learnt, as has been proposed for categorisation in other domains (e.g Bowerman and Choi, 2001; Choi, 2006) If this were the case, one could expect to find “Whorfian” effects on actor categorisation This has, to the best of our knowledge, not been investigated to date 14 In addition, the interaction of several attractors may serve to produce more complex patterns than would be expected on the basis of a single attractor Scales in real-time language comprehension: A review 343 Neuroanatomical evidence for a non-linguistic actor attractor network Having proposed that the ubiquitous effects of the actor category on language comprehension in different languages could be due to an actorhood attractor based on more general cognitive properties, we would now like to underscore this proposal with some concrete evidence Specifically, we will describe findings from functional neuroimaging which demonstrate that the brain regions involved in actor identification in language also appear to support non-linguistic processes of recognising actors The results discussed in this section stem from experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a method which can reveal stimulus- or task-related changes in the activation of neural regions based on relative blood oxygenation In contrast to EEG/ERP data, fMRI offers a very high spatial resolution, thereby allowing for the precise localisation of brain functions However, its temporal resolution is relatively poor due to the delay of the haemodynamic response For an introduction to fMRI as applied to sentence and discourse processing, see Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Friederici (2007); for a more detailed introduction to the methodological details directed at a linguistic audience, see Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky (2009a) A region that appears to be particularly important for the processing of actor information is the posterior portion of the left superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), the location of which is depicted in Figure Increased activation in the pSTS arises whenever the A-argument does not outrank the P-argument in terms of some dimension of prominence This has been demonstrated for both animacy (Grewe et al., 2006; Grewe et al., 2007) and definiteness/specificity (BornkesselSchlesewsky et al., 2009) For example, sentences such as (12a), in which both the A and the P arguments are animate and definite, engender increased activation in this region in comparison to sentences such as (12b), in which the Aargument is animate and the P-argument is inanimate Note that this activation difference is unlikely to be due to a difference of animacy at the word level (i.e to the processing of two animate arguments as opposed to one animate and one inanimate argument) as this is known to engender activation differences in other neural regions (for a detailed discussion, see Grewe et al., 2007) (12) Example stimuli from Grewe et al (2007) a Wahrscheinlich hat der Mann den Direktor gepflegt probably has [the man]:NOM [the director]:ACC cared.for ‘The man probably took care of the director.’ b Wahrscheinlich hat der Mann den Garten gepflegt probably has [the man]:NOM [the garden]:ACC cared.for ‘The man probably took care of the garden.’ 344 Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Matthias Schlesewsky Figure 3: Lateral view of the left hemisphere of the human brain The following regions are identified schematically: pSTG/STS – posterior superior temporal gyrus / sulcus; POp – pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG); PTr – pars triangularis of the IFG; POr – pars orbitalis of the IFG These findings provide a first indication that the pSTS may be crucially involved in the assessment of role prototypicality during language comprehension Importantly, this region (or its right-hemispheric homologue) has also been implicated in the inference of agency (Frith and Frith, 1999) and the processing of goal-directed action (Saxe, 2006) in non-linguistic tasks It also shows increased activation for biological vs non-biological motion (Grezes et al., 2001; Saygin et al., 2004) and when autonomous, goal-directed movements of geometrical shapes gives rise to the percept of animacy (Schultz et al., 2005) Thus, the pSTS appears to provide an interface between the comprehension of (linguistically expressed) transitive events and more general cognitive mechanisms for the processing of actor features (e.g autonomous movement, goal-directedness, sentience) in the understanding of actions and events Effects of prominence information have also been observed in a cortical region distinct from the pSTS, namely within the pars opercularis (POp) of the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) This region (see Figure for its location) forms Scales in real-time language comprehension: A review 345 part of one of the most well-known classical language “centres”, namely Broca’s area Sensitivity to prominence scales within the POp has been most readily apparent in studies examining the processing of word order variations Thus, the POp shows increased activation whenever, in a transitive sentence, the first argument (in terms of linear order) is outranked by the second argument on one of the prominence scales in (11) This has been demonstrated for case marking (e.g Röder et al., 2002; Friederici et al., 2006; Kinno et al., 2008), animacy (Grewe et al., 2006), definiteness/specificity (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al., 2009) and pronominality (Grewe et al., 2005) as two aspects of referentiality, as well as for generalised semantic roles (Bornkessel et al., 2005) Strikingly, all of these information sources modulate activation within the same neural region – the POp – thus suggesting that semantic prominence scales such as animacy and referentiality affect the neural processing of word order in a qualitatively similar manner to morphosyntactic prominence scales such as case marking In summary, functional imaging results have revealed that the processing of prominence information in sentence comprehension draws upon a leftlateralised fronto-temporal neural network comprising the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior superior temporal sulcus This assumption is further supported by data from English, which has shown that animacy information serves to modulate (or even neutralise) the activation of Broca’s region in the processing of object relative clauses, in addition to influencing activation in left posterior superior temporal regions (Chen, West, Waters, & Caplan, 2006) Existing findings thus suggest that the pars opercularis is particularly involved in mapping prominence information onto linear order, with a general preference for more prominent arguments to precede less prominent arguments The pSTS, by contrast, engages in the relational construction of an argument hierarchy, with a preference for natural transitivity (i.e for the Aargument to outrank the P-argument on all available dimensions of prominence) Conclusions To conclude, there is a good deal of empirical evidence to suggest that prominence scales play a central role in real-time language comprehension, particularly in allowing for online role assignments and the assessment of role prototypicality Moreover, rather than being dissociated from “classic” morphosyntactic features, semantic scales such as animacy fulfil qualitatively similar functions to these in the comprehension process and show activation in similar neural networks They also engender highly comparable neurophysiological responses across 346 Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Matthias Schlesewsky typologically different languages and this is independent of their language specific weighting (importance for the comprehension process) We have argued that the ubiquity of scales in language processing can be traced back to their origin as characteristics of the actor attractor category, via which language neurally interfaces with the human ability to understand goal-directed action Hence, in spite of their centrality in comprehension, scales are nevertheless an epiphenomenon of the actor concept Appendix A: A brief introduction to event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in language research Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are small changes in the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain, which occur in response to sensory or cognitive stimuli and which may be measured non-invasively by means of electrodes applied to the scalp ERPs provide a very high temporal resolution, which is particularly useful as a means of tracking real time language processing Furthermore, ERP patterns (‘components’) can be characterised along a number of different dimensions, thus providing a qualitative measure of the different processes involved in language comprehension These dimensions are: polarity (negative vs positive), topography (at which electrode sites an effect is visible), latency (the time at which the effect is visible relative to the onset of a critical stimulus), and amplitude (the “strength” of an effect) While a number of language-related ERP components have been identified (cf., for example, Kutas et al., 2006), we will not introduce these here for the sake of brevity For a more detailed description of the ERP methodology and how it has been applied to psycholinguistic domains of investigation, the reader is referred to the overviews presented in Coles and Rugg (1995), Garnsey (1993), and Kutas and Van Petten (1994) The ERP methodology only provides relative measures, i.e an effect always results from the comparison of a critical condition with a minimally differing control condition For example, at the position of socks in He spread the warm bread with socks in comparison to the position of butter in He spread the warm bread with butter, a negativity with a central distribution and a maximum at 400 ms post critical word onset (N400) is observable (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980) Thus, in the experiments discussed here, we always compare the response to a critical condition with that to a control condition at a particular (critical) position in the sentence A schematic illustration of the ERP methodology is shown in Figure Scales in real-time language comprehension: A review 347 Figure 4: Schematic depiction of the setup of an ERP experiment on language processing (adapted from Coles & Rugg 1995) The ongoing EEG is recorded while participants read or listen to linguistic stimuli Critical stimulus-related activity is isolated from the background electrical activity of the brain by means of an averaging procedure, which applies to a set of stimuli (typically 30–40) of the same type The resulting 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Case, word order, and prominence Interacting cues in language production and comprehension, pp 91–119 Berlin: Springer Subject index absolutive (case) 82, 88–89, 181–82, 223, 237, 250, 257–58, 263, 266–67, 283, 292, 297–303, 306, 308–309, 311, 313–14, 317 – see also: ergativity, marked absolutive accessibility hierarchy 1, 297, 319 Actor Identification Strategy (AIS) 337, 339– 40 actor (prototype, role) 322, 327, 330, 337– 40, 342, 343, 344, 346 Agree 4, 175, 177–80, 183, 185–7, 190–2, 205, 207, 211, 212, 213, 215, 218, 219, 224, 227, 229, 231, 244–5, 247–8, 251– 60, 261–3, 266–9 – defective Agree 177–87, 192 – multiple Agree 178, 179 – specificity-driven Agree 227, 251–5 agreement 1, 3, 4, 11, 102, 131–5, 137, 141, 144, 146, 148–51, 153–4, 157, 159, 162– 3, 173, 175, 177, 180–2, 186, 187, 189– 92, 198, 212, 227–34, 237–45, 251, 253, 255–8, 260, 263, 265–6, 268–9, 280– 3, 285–6, 302, 313, 330, 331 – Number Agreement 144–5, 163, 178–86, 231 – Person Agreement 146–51, 163, 175, 178– 86, 187, 190, 233, 256, 260 agreement displacement 230, 251, 266–8 alignment 9–13, 23, 27, 36–40, 197, 200–1, 203, 208–9, 212, 215–220, 222, 280–6, 290–1, 297–303, 306–311, 313–315, 317–319 – alignment hypothesis 299, 301–03, 306, 308 – see also: overt marking hypothesis – alignment sets 10–13, 15, 20, 23–24, 26– 27, 32, 40 – alignment splits (split alignment; see also: split ergativity) 4, 7, 11, 20, 23, 26, 27, 32, 39–40, 131, 275, 277, 279–81, 283– 85, 287–93, 297, 299–303, 307–11, 313–15, 317–19 – aspectual (perfective/imperfective) split 95–6, 279–82, 285–91, 293 – by clause type 26, 308–15, 319 – noun-based 275, 279 – split by gender 315–18 – Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM)-based 279, 289, 291 – Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM)-hierarchy for alignment splits 281–85, 288, 289–93 – one-dimensional 285 – two-dimensional 287–8 – see also: case alignment, ergativity, harmonic alignment alternations: – asymmetric 291 – case 173–74, 177, 183, 187–90, 277 – direct-inverse 227, 229–31, 234–35, 238, 240, 243–44, 246, 259, 268 – fluid 277, 301 – inchoative/causative 3, 61, 63, 66–67 – symmetric 291 – transitivity 277 – zero/nonzero 8, 75–77, 87, 91, 97, 102, 106, 109, 112, 124, 125, 237–38 ambiguity 246, 278, 323, 331 – ambiguity resolution 324 animacy 3–5, 33, 94, 131, 173–76, 180–82, 186–88, 190–93, 250, 276, 277, 321, 325–37, 343–45 – animacy restriction 180–182, 192 – see also: scale(s) antipassives 204, 223, 281, 284 ‘anti-Silverstein’ pattern 279 argument structure 215, 217, 222, 224, 277 attractor (neural) 5, 322, 337, 341–3, 346 blocking 121, 142, 162, 163 case, case marking 7–9, 11–12, 17, 20, 22, 30–31, 33, 35, 38–40, 50, 75–77, 80, 98, 103, 113, 164, 176–77, 187–90, 192, 204, 230, 257, 275–81, 289, 291, 297, 299–303, 305–06, 308–09, 313– 15, 323, 325, 329, 331, 333–35, 342, 345 – discriminating function of 275–76, 302–03 354 Subject index – indexing or identifying function of 275–77, 293, 303 – see also: alternations: case; case alignment; differential argument encoding, differential case marking case alignment 7–8, 15, 20, 40, 310, 315, 318 causatives 61–63, 66–72 – see also: alternations: inchoative/causative clause type: see alignment splits Clitic Binding Restriction 193–94 comparative concepts 16, 45, 52–55 constraint conjunction 80, 131, 162, 292 countercyclicity 228, 255, 269 crossing 197, 203–04, 208, 215, 216, 218, 220, 221 – one-way crossing 203, 208, 209, 212, 215, 216, 224 – reciprocal crossing 204, 221, 223 – two-way crossing 204, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224 defective probe 183, 187, 192 definiteness 17, 101, 121, 173–76, 180, 190, 192, 250, 276, 287, 291, 325, 329, 331, 343, 345 – definiteness restriction 17, 182–87, 193 – see also: scale(s) descriptive categories: see comparative concepts diachronic bias(es) 7, 24, 30, 34, 36, 38–40 differential argument encoding, differential case-marking 3–4, 20, 22, 27–29, 40, 75–82, 84, 86–87, 89–91, 98, 102–03, 105, 112–13, 116–17, 119, 124–25, 164, 173, 177, 187–90, 192, 227, 276–79, 289, 291 – differential object marking 7, 13, 46, 50– 52, 56, 81, 87, 91, 94, 101–02, 106–07, 110, 112, 117–19, 131, 275, 277, 293 – differential subject marking 7, 13, 87, 94, 95, 277, 293 differential displacement 189–92 direct marking 233, 263 direction marking 131–32, 160, 162–63, 193, 227–30, 232–34, 237, 256–57, 263, 269 – see also: alternations: direct-inverse, direct marking, inverse marking, inversion construction dissimilarity matrix 3, 60, 64, 71–73 Distributed Morphology 3, 76–77, 83–84, 91–92, 100, 125, 133, 248 Distributed Optimality 133 Ditransitive Person-Role Constraint 46–47 Elsewhere Principle 136, 142–44 EPP (Extended Projection Principle) 189–91, 245, 256, 260, 269 ergative (case) 8–10, 12, 26, 36, 59, 87, 94– 96, 220–21, 223, 237, 250, 257–58, 263, 266, 275–76, 278, 280–87, 290– 93, 298, 303, 313–14, 316, 329 – ergative displacement 266–67 – split-ergative systems 305, 308, 339 – see also: ergativity, split ergativity ergativity (ergative alignment) 37, 204, 263– 64, 277, 279–82, 286, 291, 297–303, 306, 308, 313–14, 316–17 – see also: ergative (case), split ergativity event-related brain potentials (ERPs) 328, 331–32, 334, 343, 346–47 expletives, expletive subjects 179, 191 extended-ergative system 298 faithfulness constraint 50, 82–84, 87, 93, 96, 98–102, 105–07, 109, 111–12, 116– 17, 120–22, 124–25, 277–79, 290–291, 293 feature checking 245, 253–54, 258 feature decomposition 250 feature hierarchies 293 feature structures 101, 119–121, 124, 135– 37, 139–43, 150, 153–54, 156–59, 164– 67, 269 feature valuation 181, 186, 188, 190–91, 209, 212, 252–54, 258–59 – see also: Agree filler-gap distance 324 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 331, 343 gender 16, 85, 91, 104, 175, 192, 315, 317–19 generalised semantic roles 323, 345 Subject index genitive of negation 183–87 goal (Agree) 4, 177–83, 185–88, 190–92, 227, 229, 244–45, 251–56, 258–59, 261, 267, 269–70 – see also: Agree, feature valuation, probe goal (theta role) 201–02, 204–06, 215 harmonic alignment 3, 4, 50, 75–82, 84, 87, 96–97, 105, 108, 111–12, 114, 116, 123, 125, 131–32, 162–163, 174, 203, 205, 212, 215–18, 222, 228, 275, 289 hierarchy: see animacy, definiteness, scale(s) high-ranking arguments 10–14 – see also: low-ranking arguments iconicity 77, 84–87, 95–96, 109, 111, 124– 25, 131 imperatives 123, 260, 282–90, 292, 313 implicational hierarchy: see scale(s) impoverishment 3, 75, 77, 81, 83–87, 89– 96, 99–102, 105, 109, 111–12, 115, 118– 19, 121–25, 137 inchoative(s) 61, 63, 66–72 – see also: alternation: inchoative/causative incremental interpretation 1, 276, 322–26, 329–30, 339 inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) 344–45 interface (morphology-syntax) 76, 84, 125, 228 interface hypothesis of incremental argument interpretation 328–31, 337 inverse marking 77, 87, 90, 131, 151–52, 157, 162–63, 228, 233, 257, 263, 265– 66 inversion construction 45–47, 53 language comprehension 5, 321–23, 325, 328–30, 332–33, 337, 339, 342–46 locality 229, 244, 251–52 low-ranking arguments 10–14 – see also: high-ranking arguments markedness 10, 12–14, 20, 23, 36, 79, 90– 91, 108, 110, 145, 162, 197, 203–04, 206, 216, 220, 276–81, 285, 290–91, 299, 304, 307–08 355 markedness constraint 49, 76, 80–82, 93, 96, 99–101, 105, 107, 109, 111–12, 117– 22, 124–25, 162–63, 276–77, 291 markedness hierarchy/scale 59, 75, 79, 81, 84, 87, 108, 125, 189, 275, 290, 292–93 marked-S languages 297–300, 303–05, 307–10, 314–15, 317–18 – marked absolutive 298–99, 309, 311 – marked nominative 5, 11, 297–99, 301–02, 304–08, 310, 313–14, 316–18 Minimalist Program 174, 247–49, 269–70 Multi-Dimensional Scaling 31–32 negation 217–18 – see also: genitive of negation N400 328, 332–37, 346, 347 Object Shift 189–91 one-dimensional scales (vs multidimensional scales) 3, 31–32, 60, 62, 285, 287, 289, 293 Optimality Theory 1, 4, 49, 51–52, 79–80, 125, 136, 275, 289, 293 Output-Output Correspondences 293 overt marking hypothesis 299, 301–03, 306, 308 – see also: alignment hypothesis participant (formal feature, speech-act) 17, 23, 174, 189, 192, 250, 270 passives 27, 114, 115, 177, 184, 200, 209, 219–21, 223, 238–42, 312, 327, 335 perfectivity 4, 95–96, 200–01, 207, 214, 216, 279–82, 285–91, 293 Person-Case Constraint (PCC) 4, 173–74, 177–83, 185–87, 190, 192–94, 227 Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) 211, 217–18, 248, 252 prefixation, prefixes 4, 46, 131, 132–34, 146, 152, 163, 165, 168, 197, 199–201, 214, 216–17, 222, 224, 232, 260, 264– 66, 312 prepositions 198–201, 205, 207, 211–14, 216–17, 222–23, 239, 241 privileged syntactic argument 323 356 Subject index probe 4, 177–81, 183, 185–88, 191–93, 212, 227, 230, 247–48, 251–61, 266, 267–70 – see also: Agree, feature valuation, goal prominence (features, information) 325–31, 336–40, 344–45 prominence (scale): see scale(s) pronouns 8–10, 13–14, 16–18, 23–24, 33, 39–40, 56, 78, 81, 87, 89–90, 102–03, 105–06, 113–15, 117, 119, 137, 139, 178, 292, 300, 304–08, 315, 318 proto-roles (proto-agent, proto-patient) 10, 277 referential hierarchy: see scale(s) resultatives 114, 199, 214, 281–82, 284–85, 287–88, 290–91 scale(s): – animacy 46, 47, 50–54, 59–61, 78–79, 97, 173, 221, 232–33, 275, 287–89, 292– 93, 301, 321 – case 4, 197, 202, 204–05, 208, 215, 224 – comparative 45, 52–57 – complex scale trees 197, 203–04, 206, 208–09, 212–13, 215–24 – definiteness 50, 78, 81, 97, 103, 105, 114– 17, 176, 288 – descriptive 45, 47, 53, 55–57 – of form 60–62, 67, 69, 71–73 – of function 60, 64, 69–73 – generalized notion of 73 – implicational 1, 7, 45–46, 49, 51, 54–55, 57, 59, 140 – person/animacy 3, 173–76, 180, 221, 232 – person/definiteness 175–76 – prominence 4, 17, 78, 107–08, 132, 140– 41, 145–46, 151, 173–74, 176, 192, 197, 202, 205–06, 227, 229, 231–32, 243, 245, 250, 260, 276, 297, 299–302, 314, 318–19, 321–22, 325–31, 337, 339, 345 – referential 2, 7–11, 14–16, 27, 39–40, 173, 300 – relational 45–47, 51, 54 – Silverstein 2–4, 8–11, 78, 81, 94, 101–02, 112, 124, 173, 187, 192, 227, 232, 269, 275–76, 300–02, 306–08 – specificity 251, 261 – theta-role 197, 202, 204–06, 208, 224 – universal 4, 7, 20, 22–24, 30, 37–39, 50, 54–56, 140, 293, 315 scrambling 4, 189, 218 semantic map 52, 60, 62–63, 69 Silverstein hierarchy: see scale(s) specificity (quantitative notion) 4, 84–85, 92–93, 100–01, 105, 115, 124, 227, 229–30, 248–54, 261, 267, 269–70 – see also: Agree: specificity-driven specificity (semantic notion) 17, 94, 173–74, 181–82, 192, 276, 287, 329, 343, 345 split ergativity 94, 187, 227, 275, 301 – Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM)-based 4, 279 Strong Minimalist Thesis 174 Subset Principle 92–93, 95–96, 100–02, 122–23, 142, 248 superior temporal sulcus (STS) 343–45 telicity 114, 200, 214, 216 theta roles 206, 208, 215–16, 223 topicalization 211, 243–44 transitivity 277, 280–81, 290–91, 345 unaccusatives 184–5, 198, 209–13, 215, 301–02 undergoer (prototype) 338, 340 unergatives 184, 198, 207, 209, 302 universals 8–9, 24, 29, 32, 38–40, 46, 50, 52, 54–55, 59, 79, 140, 163, 174, 249, 288–89, 297–98, 303, 319, 321, 340, 342 – see also: scale(s): universal Vocabulary Insertion 83, 92–93, 121, 133– 36, 140–143, 150, 164 zero (Ø-) licensing 133, 137, 139–42, 145, 150–51, 156, 158–63 ... Alternations, and the Prominence of Person Petr Biskup and Gerhild Zybatow Prefixes, Scales and Grammatical Theory 45 59 75 131 197 Jakob Hamann Argument Encoding in Direction Systems and Specificity-Driven... prominence scales in grammatical theory by looking at the interaction of theta-role and case scales in the domain of prefixation in Russian and Czech, proposing a structural, c-command-based approach... together these different empirical and theoretical perspectives on scales, this volume hopefully achieves its aim of advancing our understanding of the role of scales and hierarchies across the linguistic