The Nominative & Accusative and their counterparts

Editors

Kristin Davidse | University of Leuven

Béatrice Lamiroy | University of Leuven

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027228147 (Eur) | EUR 125.00

ISBN 9781588111821 (USA) | USD 188.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027297792 | EUR 125.00 | USD 188.00

This volume is devoted to the central cases relating to the basic oppositions between subject-object and agent-patient, viz. nominative and accusative, as well as their counterparts such as ergative and absolutive. It aims at contributing to the typological investigation of these cases by providing descriptive studies of ten different languages, not only Romance and Germanic languages, but also Polish and Basque, as well as Cora, Warrwa and Ewe. These studies show that the formal devices used to mark the two nuclear cases may be quite diverse (including non-overt and ‘configurational’ coding), but that all the languages studied crucially display a subject-object asymmetry, even languages such as Basque and Ewe for which this had been questioned. One of the most striking subthemes to emerge from this collection is the complexity of the object-zone, both with regard to formal and functional diversity. Various studies in the volume also contribute reflections, couched mainly in broadly cognitive-functional terms, about the semantic function of the subject-object contrast and why it is so central across languages.

[Case and Grammatical Relations Across Languages, 4] 2002. x, 363 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/cagral.4

Table of Contents

Preface | p. vii

Abbreviations | p. viii

1. Introduction

Kristin Davidse and Béatrice Lamiroy | pp. 1–14

2. Romance transitivity

Michael Herslund | pp. 15–39

3. Objects and quasi-objects: The constellation of the object in French

Ludo Melis | pp. 41–79

4. A construction grammar approach to transitivity in Spanish

Nicole Delbecque | pp. 81–130

5. Nominative and oblique in English: Reflexive clauses as a test case for distinct Agent–Patient models

Kristin Davidse | pp. 131–173

6. Aspects of nominative and accusative in German

Luk Draye | pp. 175–200

7. The source–path–goal schema and the accusative in interaction with the genitive in Polish

Zofia Kaleta | pp. 201–225

8. Objects, verbs and categories in the Cora lexicon

Eugene H. Casad | pp. 227–264

9. Ergativity and accusativity in Basque

R.L. Trask | pp. 265–284

10. Ergative and accusative patterning in Warrwa

William B. McGregor | pp. 285–317

11. Constituent order and grammatical relations in Ewe in typological perspective

Felix K. Ameka | pp. 319–352

Author index | pp. 353–355

Subject index | pp. 356–362

“[...] a collection of extremely important papers that will certainly enrich the current discussion of grammatical relations. Most likely, the book will motivate researches to study features of accusativity to the same extent as has been done in the past with respect to ergative features.”

Wolfgang Schulze, University of Munich, Germany, in Language, Vol. 80:3 (2004)

Subjects