Case Inversion in Georgian: Syntactic Properties and Sentence Processing

Abstract

The morphological and syntactic facts from Georgian create a unique puzzle for the study of sentence processing. The word order is characterized by considerable freedom and case marking is not uni-directionally associated with θ-roles. This article presents a grammatical account of Georgian case marking and a study on incremental sentences processing. The empirical findings show that case is indeed a more reliable cue than word order in processing clauses with thematically ambiguous arguments. Furthermore, the obtained data suggest an asymmetry between dative experiencers and dative actors, such that only the revision of the thematic properties of the latter is associated with high processing cost. PRELIMINARIESThat the human sentence processing mechanism makes use of all available cues for grammatical function assignment and structure building in incremental sentence processing is a very natural assumption that has been confirmed in a number of experimental studies. MacWhinney et al. (1984) were among the first showing this by demonstrating that overt case marking, morphological agreement information and syntactic position are used to different degrees in different languages in a sentence interpretation experiment.Early online-studies concerned with the effect of explicit morphological marking used morphological information that is (relatively) unambiguous in nature. For example, Krems (1984) found increased reading times for German sentences beginning with an NP unambiguously marked for the accusative case that almost always marks direct objects only (as compared to sentences beginning with a nominative noun phrase), a result later confirmed by Hemforth (1993) and Fanselow et al. (1999a) Unambiguous case marking need not, however, indicate the grammatical function and/or structural position of the NP bearing it in an unambiguous way. While subjects are marked with the nominative case and indirect (second) objects with

Experimental Approaches to Ergative Languages

“…Japanese (Ueno and Garnsey 2008); see also Schlesewsky 2009: 159 andSkopeteas et al (2012) for evidence that morphological case is a strong cue in processing). Thus, based on cueing effects, the nominative gap in a relative clause of an accusative language should also have a processing advantage.…”

“…Similarly, in Japanese researchers have investigated the processing of nominative-marked vs. dative-marked wh-phrases (Aoshima et al 2004). A recent study on Georgian (Skopeteas et al 2012) also compared the structural nominative and the inherent dative. The results of the existing studies have been largely inconclusive, although Jacobsen (2000: 148-149) indicates that structural but not inherent case evoked a late positivity in German, and that violations of structural case evoked a higher negativity.…”

“…In the "accidental tourist" studies, the choice of a given language is due to properties other than ergativity. Skopeteas et al's (2012) work is an example of such a study. The authors examine the processing of dative subjects and objects in Georgian and conclude that case marking plays a more important role in online parsing than word order.…”

“…Similarly, Duñabeitia et al (2007) compare morphological decomposition in Spanish and Basque, but the choice of Basque is motivated by its agglutinative properties, not by ergativity; Erdocia et al (2012) likewise offer an impressive study of verb-final and verb-medial orders in Basque, which are orthogonal to ergativity. We will not discuss "accidental tourist" studies further in this chapter (although we will briefly return to Skopeteas et al (2012) in section 5).…”

The rise and fall of a person-case constraint in Breton

“…There are synthetic perfect counterparts with oblique-A + nominative-absolutive O (e.g. Georgian, for compatible analyses see Skopeteas al. 2012, Béjar 2003, and nonperfect counterparts including by extension of coding originating in perfects (cf.…”