Linguistics 567: Grammar Engineering

Preparation for Lab 3

• Find translations for the words listed on the vocab wiki page that you don't already have in your lexicon.
• 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.
  • Does case interact with definiteness (or any other phenemenon) in an interesting way?
• Determine whether your language has agreement. Consider person, number, gender, case, and definiteness, and consider subject-verb, object-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, look into whether there is anything else interesting about how grammatical relations are marked and/or contact me about possible things to work on.
• Create a testsuite illustrating case or agreement or whatever phenemona you've decided to work on.