: This study describes a new field method, suited for investigating scope relations — and other aspects of truth conditional meaning — with native speaker consultants who may speak no other language and have no background in linguistics or logic. This method revealed a surprising scope contrast between the antipassive and the ergative construction in Greenlandic Eskimo. The results of this field work are described in detail and a crosslinguistic scope generalization is proposed based on Greenlandic Eskimo, Basque, Polish, (...) Russian, Finnish and English. (shrink)

We analyze Case in terms of independent constraints on syntactic structures — namely, the Projection Principle (inherent Case), the ECP (marked structural Case), and the theory of extended projections (the nominative, a Caseless nominal projection). The resulting theory accounts for (1) the government constraint on Case assignment, (2) all major Case systems (accusative, ergative, active, three-way, and split), (3) Case alternations (passive, antipassive, and ECM), and (4) the Case of nominal possessors. Structural Case may correlate with pronominal agreement because (...) the former can, and the latter must, involve antecedent-government by a functional head. However, neither phenomenon implies the other. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that the L-stem (stem III) in Quranic Arabic is a pluractional derivation of the G-stem (stem I) and that it expresses distributive participant plurality. With direct objects that refer to a plurality of nonvolitional entities, the verb form describes a plurality of situations conceptualized distributively among the objects. With direct objects that refer to volitional participants, the situations are typically conceptualized as inversely distributed between the subject participant and the object participant. When the verb (...) form is used antipassively, the object participant is syntactically omitted but semantically implied. (shrink)