Schedule 73. StuTS

I'll give a summary of case syncretism and case containment in languages across the world. Then I'll classify them into groups based on the number of arguments in a clause and foreshadow possible implications for grammatical theories of case.

In this talk I'll first give an overview of studies investigating form similarities in case morphs (Baerman, Blake, Caha, Zompi and my own observations), namely syncretisms (f.e. Burushaski: gus ('woman') - ABS, guse - ERG, gusmo - GEN; dán ('stone') - ABS, dáne - both ERG and GEN) and containments (f.e. Agul: zaw ('sky') - ABS, zawu - ERG, zawun - GEN).

Then I'll classify the different patterns using a set theoretic system developed by Carroll (2021) for multiple exponence. I analyze the resulting classifications as reflecting the number of arguments in a clause (henceforth called arity classes). Based on this I'll formulate the hypothesis that case morphs can share their form with another case morph iff they both express an argument of the same or adjacent arity class.

References:
Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown, and Greville G. Corbett (2005). The syntax–morphology
interface: A study of syncretism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blake, Barry J. (2001). Case. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [1st edn., 1994.]

Caha, Pavel. 2009. The nanosyntax of case. University of Tromsø dissertation

Carroll, M.J. Verbose exponence: Integrating the typologies of multiple and distributed exponence. Morphology 32, 1–24 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09384-8

Zompì, Stanislao. 2017. Case decomposition meets dependent-case theories. Uni-
versità di Pisa MA thesis.

Info

Day: 2023-05-28
Start time: 15:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: IG 0.254
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics

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