This chapter centers around inflectional morphology, used to convey grammatical meaning, particularly in connection to nouns and other nominal elements. It addresses ways in which natlangs vary morphologically, including using infixes and circumfixes, which are relatively unusual in languages. This chapter also explores ways in which languages express number, gender and case morphologically, and it introduces glossing, a set of conventions used to indicate word structure and meaning. In addition, this chapter provides conlanging practice, includes a set of guided questions to facilitate building the nominal morphology in a conlang, and outlines the basics of nominal morphology in the Salt language.

This chapter introduces syntax, i.e. sentence structure. It distinguishes between clauses and sentences and discusses sentence constituents and constituency tests. This chapter also discusses sentence structure and word order, which can be fixed or flexible, and considers how some word orders tend to correlate with other linguistic characteristics in a language. In addition, this chapter provides conlanging practice, a set of guided questions to develop the basic structure of sentences in a conlang, and outlines the sentence structure of the Salt language.

This chapter builds on the grammatical foundation provided in Chapters 7 and 8, specifically diving into grammatical features of nouns. In this chapter, you will be introduced to three major ways nouns can inflect in languages: number, noun class, and case. The examples provided throughout each section focus on the most common types of inflections found in languages to help inspire you as you make noun-marking decisions for your conlang. The final section explores connections between adpositions and case. The exercises at the end of this chapter ask you to decide whether you will mark nouns for number, noun class, and/or case and, if so, how.

In this chapter we first look at the DP-hypothesis, the idea that nominals are DPs rather than NPs, and that NP is a complement of D. We then refine this idea, motivating a tripartite structure for the nominal, analogous to what we saw for the clause in the previous chapter. Next, we focus on the argument structure of nominals, comparing and contrasting with argument structure in the clause. Finally, we briefly describe the ways in which grammatical functions are marked in nominals, again contrasting this with the clause.

The goal of this chapter is to develop a theory of Formal Features that will capture and unify many of the generalisations we have arrived at in previous chapters and, more specifically, to develop a theory of Case, agreement and movement, showing how these three notions are intertwined. The core notion is the Agree relation.

This chapter develops an analysis of long-distance passives in German according to which these constructions basically emerge from the co-occurrence of passivization and restructuring in the language. In Chapters 3 and 4, I have argued that passivization and restructuring both involve an operation of structure removal in the course of the derivation – of an external argument DP in the first case, and of CP and TP layers of an infinitive in the second case. The null hypothesis that is pursued in this chapter against this background is that a combination of the two structure removal operations essentially gives rise to the intricate properties of long-distance passives in German. A core feature of the analysis is that it does not involve any long-distance relation at any point; argument demotion, case assignment, and morphological realization as passive all take place extremely locally. Another basic property of the new approach, which sets it apart from other analyses, is that all DP arguments selected by the verbs involved (including in particular external arguments in the embedded and matrix domains) can be assumed to be structurally represented at some point of the derivation; among other things, this accounts for the absence of control shift.

Grammatical morphemes are used to modulate word meanings and to link words in constructions. They consist of inflections, usually suffixes, added to words, and free-standing function words (prepositions and articles). Different language-types make different uses of these, including cases added to each noun, tense and aspect markers added to each verb, and agreement markers linking nouns, adjectives, and determiners. Children have to identify each inflection, its meaning, and where it is used on each word class. They start to add modulations to their words as soon as they start to combine words (and may understand some of them before this). They use regular forms as their starting point and over-regularize irregular forms. They show some consistency in the order of acquisition for different modulations, depending on the semantic complexity of each grammatical morpheme. Semantic complexity, formal complexity, and frequency all play a role here. Children may initially rely on filler-syllables, and only later produce the relevant form. Word class plays a role here, since the choice of grammatical morphemes depends on this. Initial use of grammatical morphemes may be limited to specific words and only later extended. The same holds for agreement in gender and number.

The seemingly idiosyncratic behavior of numerals in Russian and other Slavic languages has long puzzled linguists. This entry describes the core phenomena, taking Russian as a point of departure. Significant differences in other Slavic languages are also identified, since a central problem of analysis is how variation across Slavic might be accommodated. The core data issues concern case and agreement, the former with respect to the phrase containing the numeral, the latter both internal to the numeral phrase as well as between it and the predicate. Related phenomena exhibited by other quantity expressions are also presented. In the course of the presentation, several conceptual approaches are briefly identified, and the reader is directed to relevant research.

The present chapter discusses agreement in Slavic languages. Slavic languages are interesting because of their canonical subject-verb agreement, which offers a direct insight into this core syntactic relation (syntactic agreement). Additionally, Slavic languages feature well-documented agreement alternations, which suggest involvement of other language components in agreement (semantic and discourse agreement). Finally, strictly local agreement, often devoid of alternations, operating inside the nominal phrase commands theoretical interest.

The chapter presents a broad overview of current research on the formal properties of Slavic languages developing in heritage language settings. Representative studies on heritage Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Croatian are synthesized along the following grammatical dimensions. In the nominal and verbal domains, I review properties of the heritage Slavic case and gender systems and the encoding of temporal distinctions through aspect and tense morphology. At the levels of sentence organization and discourse structure, I survey word order change pertaining to the syntax of clitics and the placement of clausal constituents to convey information-structural distinctions. The concluding discussion identifies the key overarching principles underlying the changes attested across the surveyed linguistic varieties and outlines directions for future studies in heritage Slavic linguistics.

Medicine teems with anecdotes, brief, pointed accounts of healthcare episodes, informed by observations and narrative arguments. Initially denoting hitherto undivulged, but notable, historical events, anecdotes narrated by doctors were not easily distinguishable from clinical cases. Those recounted by patients and carers in the modern era are the subject of this chapter, which investigates how they grasp, size up, and characterize human vulnerabilities, resulting from illness and inequalities in healthcare knowledge and power. An unregulated and anti-authoritarian idiom that does not seek to isolate events and experiences from subjective thoughts and feelings about them, these sorts of anecdotes can critically evaluate medical services and glimpse the truth about healthcare situations. Contemporary medicine, however, views anecdotal observations and viewpoints as biased and untrustworthy. Despite the current climate of scepticism concerning anecdotal information, anecdotes remain prolific oral and literary interventions, that provide vital insights into the interpersonal and social relations of healthcare.

This chapter discusses the place of inflectional and derivational morphology in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). After describing how inflection is encoded in the layered structure of the word, the chapter offers an explanatory account of the factors that motivate inflectional marking. The functional orientation of RRG presupposes a view of morphology distributed throughout the different components of the grammatical model. Additionally, the typological commitment of RRG requires paying close attention to the role of inflectional processes not only in dependent-marking languages but also in head-marking languages, since the interface between inflectional morphology and syntax is much tighter in the latter type of language. The chapter then reflects on word formation as a lexicological process which involves the interaction of lexical semantics and morphology. The approach to derivational morphology can be said to be markedly motivated by semantics.

This chapter presents a sketch grammar of Amis, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. The data are representative of the Central dialect of this language. The focus of the discussion is on phenomena related to its case marking and voice, such as applicative constructions and grammatical relations. An in-depth discussion of macrorole assignment with one-place predicates is included.

This chapter explicates the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) theory of case assignment and outlines its OT implementation and its extension to instrumental case assignment and case syncretism. The ’non-OT’ theory of case assignment in RRG is a version of dependent case theory that assigns nominative, accusative, absolutive and ergative case in terms of the ranking of actor and undergoer, while its OT-based counterpart defines accusative, ergative, dative and instrumental case with reference to (non-)macrorole status, conflates nominative and absolutive as an any-argument case, and derives the variation of case syncretism from the case hierarchy of Silverstein (1980/1993).

This chapter discusses the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) treatment of adpositional assignment and introduces a new typology of adpositional phrase types, which arises from the combination of three binary features: [±argument], which corresponds to the semantic status of the participant introduced; [±core], which indicates whether this is a core argument or a peripheral adjunct; [±predicative], which manifests the predicative or non-predicative function of the adposition. The combinations of the three features provide the basis for a principled classification of adpositional phrases, which captures the distinct functions adpositions can have in different clauses.

The conclusion presents a recap of the findings in terms of the OLG theory and new data from Faroese, Icelandic and other languages. Several suggestions are made as to how the OLG framework could be tested against new data, especially regarding pertinent questions raised by the analyses of quirky case phenomena. First, dative–accusative case frames beyond Faroese are discussed: pain-related verbs in Baltic languages occur in both dative–nominative and dative–accusative patterns, for which Seržant (2013) explicitly draws parallels with Icelandic and Faroese. Likewise, the loss of oblique subjects over time is discussed in Indo-Aryan languages: Deo and Sharma (2006) and Kiparsky (2017) identify the important factors in changes in these case systems. The trajectory seems to be similar to that of Old Norse moving via Icelandic- and Faroese-type to modern Norwegian-type systems with respect to the oblique subjects. A possessive construction in Uralic languages is also discussed, in which the oblique possessor occurs with a nominative or accusative possessum. Finally, some proposals are made for future research based on the framework itself, with reference to information structure, stochastic and other variants of Optimality Theory, locality constraints, and other topics.

Chapter 8 discusses alternative theories of case, in particular the few prior attempts to deal with the Faroese dative–accusative pattern (Woolford 2007, Jónsson 2009, Asarina 2011). Further survey data from Faroese are presented alongside engagement with these alternatives; it is argued that while these theories could be altered to achieve empirical coverage, they will miss generalisations and overgenerate in comparison to the OLG approach. Woolford (2007) deals with exceptions to Burzio’s Generalisation (Burzio 1986); where Woolford’s account runs into problems is the conflation of abstract and morphosyntactic case: the case-hierarchy constraints alone do not explain the possibility of mismatches between thematic structure, argument structure and case-marking on arguments. Second, an idea proposed by Jónsson (2009), built upon by Asarina (2011), is discussed:‘covert’ nominative case. The basic idea is not dissimilar to abstract [+HR] case instantiated in morphosyntax as the case borne by subject position; however, crucial differences render the covert nominative account undesirably over-flexible. Further survey data are presented with respect to purported nominative ‘objects’, showing that such sentences are unacceptable in contemporary Faroese and that the data are inconsistent with Asarina (2011).