Linguistics 471: Grammar Engineering

Preparation for Lab 3

• Determine whether your language has overt case, that is, whether the nouns (and/or dependents of nouns, such as determiners and adjectives) take different forms depending on the grammatical function of the NP (subject, object). If so, collect information on the relevant forms given the words in your lexicon:
  • Which case is used for subjects? (Bearing in mind that subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs might be treated differently, i.e., you might be looking at an ergative language.)
  • Which case is used for objects?
  • Do any of the verbs in your lexicon require a different case on subject or object than the general pattern?
  • How is case expressed morphologically?
  • Does the form of the case morpheme depend on which noun (or determiner or adjective) it attaches to? Find the applicable forms for the nouns in your lexicon.
• Determine whether your language has agreement. Consider person, number, gender, case, and definiteness, and consider subject-verb and determiner-noun agreement. If you don't find anything there, also consider adjective-noun agreement (but if you have plenty to do with det-n and subj-verb, don't worry about the adjectives!). If your language has agreement, collect appropriate paradigms, again focusing on the vocabulary you already have.
• If your language has no overt case and little if any agreement, collect information on modification:
  • Find three adjectives, and determine where they appear within a noun phrase.
  • Find three adverbs, and determine where they appear within a sentence. (Different adverbs might have different distributions.)