Case, valency and transitivity (review)

The three terms in the title of this volume denote concepts that apparently should lie at the basis of any typologically valid account of syntactic composition. Despite (or, probably, because of) this, these concepts are understood differently depending on the theoretical framework and on the object of study. This volume presents various views of these concepts together with an enormous amount of novel data.

Case, valency and transitivity (henceforth CVT) is the result of a symposium organized in Nijmegen in 2003 as part of the PIONEER project ‘Case cross-linguistically’. The volume is divided into three parts and includes twenty-one papers.

Part 1, ‘Morphological case’, opens with a paper by Andrew Spencer, ‘Syntactic vs. morphological case: Implications for morphosyntax’ (3–21), which discusses three instances of mismatch (from Chukchee, Czech, and German) between the systems of morphological marking and grammatical functions, and advances a strong distinction between morphological case and syntactic case. While some of these mismatches can be explained diachronically, Spencer takes a purely synchronic stance, which is contrasted with the next two papers. Leonid Kulikov, in ‘Case systems in a diachronic perspective: Atypological sketch’ (23–47), surveys the rise and fall of cases in a number of (primarily Indo-European) languages. In ‘Emergence of morphological cases in South Mande: From the amorphous type to inflectional?’ (49–64), Valentin Vydrine demonstrates the way some Mande languages acquired pronominal case forms. Tyler Peterson’s ‘Issues of morphological ergativity in the Tsimshian languages: Agreement, determiners and the reconstruction of case’ (65–90) and Johan Trommer’s ‘Direction marking and case in Menominee’ (91–111) are concerned with the identification of syntactic roles in polysynthetic Amerindian languages, Tsimshian and Algonquian, respectively. As is well known (Baker 1996, Mithun 1999), verb morphology in these languages takes many functions of case, and this characteristic is extensively discussed in both of these papers; Peterson further spends much time arguing for the case functions of some adnominal markers.

Part 2, ‘Case-marking and transitivity’, is divided into three subparts. The first, entitled ‘The syntax of case’, starts with Werner Abraham’s study, ‘Bare and prepositional differential case marking: The exotic case of German (and Icelandic) among all of Germanic’ (115–45). He proposes generalizations on the distribution of marking patterns in Germanic, in particular touching upon noncanonical subject marking and the patterns related to trivalent verbs. A paper by Jóhanna Barđdal and Thórhallur Eythórsson, ‘Control infinitives and case in Germanic: “Performance error” or marginally acceptable constructions?’ (147–77), continues Abraham’s interest in Germanic noncanonical case marking and focuses on a construction that involves controlled unexpressed subject-like obliques in German (for which this pattern was earlier claimed to be nonexistent), Faroese, and Icelandic. The third paper in this subpart, ‘Experiencer coding in Nakh-Daghestanian’ (179–202) by Dmitry Ganenkov, surveys distinct types of experiencerencoding ergative Nakh-Daghestanian (Northeast Caucasian) languages and shows their spatial origin. This subpart closes with Kalyanamalini Sahoo’s chapter, ‘“Argument sharing” in Oriya serial verb constructions’ (203–21). This chapter is seemingly the least integrated in the volume, although it provides valuable data on case-independent participant-sharing between serialized predicates.

Three papers combined in the next subpart, ‘Case interpretation’, deal with the topic of markedness. Lars Johanson, in ‘Two approaches to specificity’ (225–47), discusses the well-known Turkish alternations between marked accusatives (and genitives) and unmarked nominal forms, and stresses the relevance of structural language-specific data, as contrasted with purely functional considerations. In ‘Case markedness’ (249–67), Peter de Swart takes differential object marking in a broader perspective and emphasizes its role in rendering minimal semantic distinctness between the core arguments. The theme of case interpretation is continued by Helen de Hoop and Monique J. A. Lamers in ‘Incremental distinguishability of...