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Lithuanian and Finnish both have alternations in object marking involving the notion of partitivity. In Finnish, the case of the direct object of transitive verbs alternates between the accusative (ACC) and the partitive (PAR). PAR is the default case for the object of a transitive verb and a special feature is required for the assignment of the ACC. In Lithuanian, the case of the direct object of transitive verbs alternates between the ACC and the partitive genitive (GP). Some functions of the Finnish PAR and the Lithuanian GP in object marking are identical (i.e. partial affectedness of mass nouns), but some are markedly different. This dissertation offers an overview of the factors that have been invoked in the literature as affecting the use of PAR cases, and also a comparison of their relevance and relative ranking in Finnish and Lithuanian. The dissertation also discusses Lithuanian GP with discrete nouns and offers an overview of possible conditions for the use of GP in resultative constructions in modern and older Lithuanian in comparison with their counterparts in Finnish and Slavic. A corpus-based study was performed in order to analyse the grammatical and semantic constraints of the use of Finnish PAR and Lithuanian GP. The research presented in this dissertation is data-driven, both qualitative and quantitative. A separate study is carried out on a wide dataset, which is then treated with an ID3 algorithm so that decision trees can be produced. The dissertation contains in all more than 200 examples mainly from Finnish and Lithuanian, but also from other languages.

Lithuanian and Finnish both have alternations in object marking involving the notion of partitivity. In Finnish, the case of the direct object of transitive verbs alternates between the accusative (ACC) and the partitive (PAR). PAR is the default case for the object of a transitive verb and a special feature is required for the assignment of the ACC. In Lithuanian, the case of the direct object of transitive verbs alternates between the ACC and the partitive genitive (GP). Some functions of the Finnish PAR and the Lithuanian GP in object marking are identical (i.e. partial affectedness of mass nouns), but some are markedly different. This dissertation offers an overview of the factors that have been invoked in the literature as affecting the use of PAR cases, and also a comparison of their relevance and relative ranking in Finnish and Lithuanian. The dissertation also discusses Lithuanian GP with discrete nouns and offers an overview of possible conditions for the use of GP in resultative constructions in modern and older Lithuanian in comparison with their counterparts in Finnish and Slavic. A corpus-based study was performed in order to analyse the grammatical and semantic constraints of the use of Finnish PAR and Lithuanian GP. The research presented in this dissertation is data-driven, both qualitative and quantitative. A separate study is carried out on a wide dataset, which is then treated with an ID3 algorithm so that decision trees can be produced. The dissertation contains in all more than 200 examples mainly from Finnish and Lithuanian, but also from other languages.

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This study is an empirical investigation of both the distribution of the specific direct object marker rā in restrictive relative clauses in spoken Farsi and the degrees of acceptance of different patterns of this structure among 50 Farsi speakers. Examples of the target structure are taken from modern films and a spoken translation test and then used in an acceptability judgement test. The findings show that there is a considerable disparity between the written relative clauses studied in previous research and spoken versions of the same structure. More specifically, the findings in this study show that the omission of the rā marker is common, that the use of rā-marked referent pronouns no longer seems to be an acceptable feature of spoken Farsi, and that the use of the rā marker and the judgement of its acceptability change according to the syntactic function(s) of the head noun phrase. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-454313

The dissertation, based on the usage-based theory of language acquisition, analyzes how students of Russian-speaking high schools mark an object through various grammatical cases governed by verbs of the Lithuanian language. The aim of the dissertation is to determine to what extent the object marking of the target group students corresponds to the Lithuanian language system and to what extent it deviates from it, and to investigate what linguistic and sociolinguistic factors determine the correctness of Lithuanian object marking. To answer the research question, a survey was conducted in four Vilnius high schools where the main language of instruction is Russian. 176 students participated in the study, working on a set of tasks prepared by the author of the dissertation. The collected research data were analyzed using linear mixed effects, generalized linear mixed effects models, and error analysis. The research results showed that object marking in Lithuanian by the participants of the study was influenced by the following linguistic factors: Frequency of verb, frequency of grammatical case, productivity of inflectional paradigm, influence of Russian language as L1. Also, one sociolinguistic factor has a significant influence on the subjects' object marking in Lithuanian - the age of Lithuanian language acquisition.

This article discusses differential object marking and object shift in German Sign Language (DGS). Although there is already some literature discussing the existence of differential object marking in sign languages, this article provides the first in-depth description of the phenomenon in a visual language. It will be shown that the sign PAM, previously categorized as an agreement auxiliary, is in fact a differential object marker with adposition-like properties—at least in the Southern variant of DGS with which this article is concerned. Additionally, it will be shown that definite objects move into a structurally higher position in DGS. This behavior is well-known from spoken languages, but is not well-documented for sign languages.

The Bantu languages show much variation in object marking, two parameters being (1) their behaviour in ditransitives (symmetric or asymmetric) and (2) the number of object markers allowed (single or multiple). This paper reveals that a combination of these parameter settings in a sample of 50+ Bantu languages results in an almost-gap, the AWSOM correlation: “asymmetry wants single object marking”. A Minimalist featural analysis is presented of Bantu object marking as agreement with a defective goal (van der Wal 2015) and parametric variation in the distribution of 𝜙 features on low functional heads (e.g. Appl) accounts for both the AWSOM and Sambaa as the one exception to the AWSOM.

Straipsnyje analizuojama sociolingvistinių veiksnių įtaka gimnazijų ugdomąja rusų kalba moksleivių lietuvių kalbos veiksmažodžio valdomo objekto raiškos taisyklingumui. Tiesinių mišriųjų modelių analizė atskleidė, kad tam, kaip taisyklingai tyrimo dalyviai reiškia lietuvių kalbos objektą, statistiškai reikšmingą įtaką turi amžius, kada moksleiviai įsisavino lietuvių kalbą, dainų lietuvių kalba klausymosi įpročiai ir lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros dalyko mokykloje pasiekimai. This article investigates the influence of sociolinguistic factors on the Lithuanian language grammatical competence of 11th grade (3rd gymnasium grade) students enrolled in Russian gymnasiums. The data of the study were collected in four high schools in Vilnius, where the language of instruction is Russian. 179 students participated in the study. To measure the grammatical competence of object marking in the Lithuanian language the Elicited Oral Imitation Test (Erlam 2006) and the task of narrative writing were used. A sociolinguistic questionnaire focused on the age of onset of Lithuanian and the linguistic behavior of students. The data were analyzed with R (R Core Team, 2013). Linear mixed effects models (LMM) were used to explore the relationship between sociolinguistic factors and students’ grammatical competence of the Lithuanian language. The results of LMM revealed that the students’ age of onset of Lithuanian affected their correctness in marking grammatical objects in Lithuanian. Students, who learned Lithuanian before the age of 4 performed better in the tasks than students who learned the language at the age of 6 or later. A strong positive correlation between the semestral grade of the Lithuanian language and literature at schools and students’ grammatical competence was also noticed. However, almost no factors of students’ linguistic behavior were significant in the analysis.

International audience; The verbal prefix wa is well attested in all branches of the Siouan lan guages. It has several functions, especially in Umoⁿhoⁿ, and this creates difficulties in analyzing it, and in teaching how it works in a clear way. I propose an analysis divid ing wa into 3 different functions: 3rd person plural object marker; antipassive marker; and nominalizer. Most importantly, I identify two types of antipassive constructions with wa, according to its referentiality. While antipassives with generic objects are ambiguous with 3rd person plural object marker, antipassive with referring objects do not lend themselves to such ambiguity, and are rather close to the nominalizing func tion. This creates difficulties in analyzing wa synchronically, and also casts doubt on the possible diachronic origin of the antipassive.

There is an ongoing debate about whether there exists a grammatical distinction between first-person and non-first person in signed languages, namely American Sign Language (ASL). The debate has been based largely on different analyses of pointing signs but minimally on the person-marking of directional verbs for object. We present an analysis of 95 unique first-person object forms of directional verbs from a combination of elicited and naturalistic data. We test the hypothesis that there is a default first-person object location at the center of the chest. Although we report evidence consistent with that hypothesis, we also find that some first-person verb forms are irregular with respect to the following dimensions of morphological properties in which they are lexically specified for: (1) final place of articulation; (2) height; (3) facing; and (4) body contact. Furthermore, a handful of directional verbs do not have first-person object forms. We interpret the findings to constitute evidence for the distinction between first-person and non-first person in ASL.

In this dissertation, I investigate various aspects of object marking and how these manifest themselves in the signed modality. The main focus is on Swedish Sign Language (SSL), the national sign language of Sweden, which is the topic of investigation in all five studies. Two of the studies adopt a comparative perspective, including other sign languages as well. The studies comprise a range of data, including corpus data, elicited production, and acceptability judgments, and combine quantitative and qualitative methods in the analyses. The dissertation begins with an overview of the topics of valency, argument structure, and object marking, primarily from a spoken language perspective. Here, the interactions between semantics and morphosyntax are presented from a typological perspective, introducing differential object marking as a key concept. With regard to signed language, object marking is discussed in terms of both verbal and nominal strategies. Verbal strategies of object marking among sign languages include directional verbs, object handshape classifiers, and embodied perspective in signing. The first study investigates the use of directionality and object handshapes as object marking strategies in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), Israeli Sign Language (ISL), and SSL. It is shown that the strategies generally display different alignments in terms of the types of objects targeted, which is uniform across languages, but that directionality is much more marginal in ABSL than in the other two languages. Also, we see that there is a connection between object marking strategies and the animacy of the object, and that the strategies, object animacy, and word order preferences interact. In the second and third studies, SSL is investigated with regard to the transitive–reflexive distinction. Here, we see that there are interactional effects between object handshapes and the perspective taken by the signer. This points to intricate iconic motivations of combining and structuring complex verb sequences, such as giving preference to agent focusing structures (e.g., agent perspective and handling handshapes). Furthermore, the use of space is identified as a crucial strategy for reference tracking, especially when expressing semantically transitive events. Nominal strategies include object pronouns and derivations of the sign PERSON. The fourth study provides a detailed account of the object pronoun OBJPRO in SSL, which is the first in-depth description of this sign. It is found that the sign is in widespread use in SSL, often corresponds closely to object pronouns of spoken Swedish, and is argued to be grammaticalized from the lexical sign PERSON. In the final study, the possible existence of object pronouns in other sign languages is investigated by using a sample of 24 languages. This analysis reveals that the feature is found mostly in the Nordic countries, suggesting areal contact phenomena. However, the study also shows that there are a number of derivations of PERSON, such as reflexive pronouns, agreement auxiliaries, and case markers. The use of PERSON as a source of grammaticalization for these functions is attributed to both semantic and phonological properties of the sign. This dissertation is unique in that it is dedicated to the topic of object marking in the signed modality. It brings a variety of perspectives and methods together in order to investigate the domain of object marking, cross-linguistically and cross-modally.

This paper investigates the second language acquisition of Persian object marking by 237 nativeBalochi-speaking children from age eight to eleven. The combination of Balochi and Persian has not beenstudied from an acquisitional perspective, although it widely occurs in southeastern Iran. This paperstudies the second language (L2) development of direct and indirect object marking after two and threeyears of exposure to Persian at school, vs. a control group of 133 monolingual native Persian children ofsimilar age and socio-economic background. Beginning learners predominantly use non-targetlike objectmarking constructions reminiscent of Balochi, whilst there is a clear trend towards Persian-style objectmarking in the more advanced learners. These findings suggest that L2 learners initially transfer core aspectsof their native grammar to their interlanguage Persian. The picture is complicated by the existenceof differential object marking in Balochi and Persian and the somewhat different writing patterns of nativeand non-native learners.

Three main issues are touched upon in this paper: (a) main morphological types of Georgian verbs in correlation with verb form, on one hand, and with the categories of telicity, stativeness, and transitivity, on the other; (b) peculiarities of case alternating objects of medial verbs; (c) and formal features of medial verbs as the basis for identification of the medial verb class (along with semantic features).This paper is based on Hopper & Thompson’s (1980) hypothesis that considers transitivity not as a strict dichotomy but as a continuum where various degrees of semantic transitivity may be distinguished. Differences expressed on semantic and syntactical levels mark one class of Georgian verbs, Class III, as intermediate between transitives and intransitives. Labile transitives, a term suggested by Melikishvili (2001), is used in this paper to indicate peculiarities of Class III verbs with respect to transitivity. This term expresses the nature of Class III verbs in terms of transitivity more accurately than the labeling of these verbs as intransitive, transitive, stative voiceless, or active intransitive verbs. It is demonstrated in this paper that various degrees of semantic transitivity as well as the category of telicity have their morphological expression in Georgian. Semantically, a case-alternating object of labile transitive verbs is often an inconcrete, non-definite object and/or is not affected by the action described in the verb. Syntactically, the difference is expressed by the lack of ability to assign a third person object marker to a verb. Case alternating objects of both Class I and Class III verbs are marked by the dative case in the tenses of series I. But the difference is that the dative marked, case alternating object of telic verbs (Class I) is usually marked by a prefix on verbs in old Georgian and in several modern dialects of East Georgia (ს-თლის s-tlis ‘s/he is peeling it’). In contrast, the dative marked, case alternating third person object of Class III verbs (atelic, labile transitives) cannot trigger a person marker on a verb (თამაშობს tamashobs but not *ს-თამაშობს *s-tamashobs ‘s/he is playing’). The latter forms are not attested, not even in those dialects where the person marking of the dative marked third person direct object is still preserved.As is described above, besides semantic peculiarities, this verb class, standing in an intermediate position between transitives and intransitives, exhibits morphological and syntactical features of its own.

Respecto de la Marcación Diferenciada de Objeto en español se han dado diversas explicaciones. Estas constituyen generalizaciones basadas en aspectos semánticos, sintácticos o pragmáticos. No obstante, en los trabajos es posible encontrar ejemplos con o sin marca, los cuales no se corresponden con las tendencias generalmente observadas. En otras palabras, no se puede dar una explicación categórica que determine cuándo un objeto debe marcarse con a. Aquí se presenta un estudio de variación gramatical que tiene por objeto establecer qué rasgos semánticos, sintácticos o pragmáticos marcan la tendencia de un objeto directo a aparecer con a. De esta manera, se distinguirán, dentro de un conjunto de rasgos, cuáles tienen mayor importancia que otros. Para este estudio se utiliza un corpus de habla mexicana espontánea. Aunque hoy día existe una gran cantidad de trabajos que intentan dar una explicación contundente del fenómeno en cuestión, ninguno lo hace desde un enfoque variacionista. Concerning the Differential Object Marking in Spanish various explanations have been given. These are generalizations based on semantic, syntactic or pragmatic aspects. However, in case studies it is possible to find examples with or without a mark, which do not correspond to the general trends. In other words, there is not a categorical explanation for stating when a direct object must be marked with a ('to'). This paper presents a grammatical variation study whose objective is to establish what semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic features show the tendency for a direct object to be marked with a. In this way, we distinguish, within a set of features, which are more important than others. The corpus for this case study has been taken from Mexican spontaneous speech. Although there are now many papers aiming to give a convincing explanation of this phenomenon, none of them does so from a variationist perspective.

This thesis investigates the syntax of object marking in Sambaa and the Bantu languages in general, with particular focus on Swahili and Haya, as points of comparison. Object marking is approached from the perspective of Minimalist syntax. The central claim is that object marking in Sambaa and related languages can be analysed as Agree (in the sense of Chomsky 2000, 2001), with certain modifications. These modifications have implications for the Agree mechanism in general. Object marking is discussed in the context of a range of syntactic environments: simple affirmative clauses, wh-questions, relative clauses and coordination structures. Based on this broad set of data, it is shown that Bantu languages cannot, as has been proposed, be divided into two types, namely those with object agreement and those with pronominal object marking (Bresnan and Mchombo 1987; Byarushengo et al. 1976, 1977 and Baker 2007). Rather, the Agree analysis can account for the object markings patterns in all languages examined. It is further shown that Bonet’s (1991, 1994) Person Case Constraint (PCC) holds for Bantu. The data discussed strongly support Bonet’s distinction between a “weak” and a “strong” PCC, as the languages discussed obey the weak but not the strong version of the PCC. Moreover, the PCC is shown to apply not only to object marking but to all ditransitive constructions in Bantu. This thesis is of relevance to syntacticians interested in agreement, object marking and the interaction of verbs and objects more generally, and to linguists interested in Bantu syntax, and in particular Sambaa, Swahili and Haya.

In this chapter, we describe six orientation motion verbs in French and Korean, which express a deictic motion and/or frontal or vertical orientation. This comparative study strengthens the view that the nature of entities such as ‘location' and ‘object' plays an important role in object selection in both languages. We also propose to refine the semantic components of motion put forward by Talmy (1985, 2000). Based on a detailed description of each type of orientation motion verb, we show that both lexical selection and grammatical object marking depend largely upon the composition of orientation verbs, which include deictic motion verbs in Korean, but not in French.