In this introductory article we provide an overview of the range of the phenomena that can be
referred to as differential argument marking (DAM). We begin with an overview of the …

Over the past two decades, linguistic typology has been moving increasingly away from its
original goal of classifying languages into ideal types that would be constrained by …

A referential hierarchy is a scalar representation of types of referents or referring
expressions that are ranked according to their deictic, semantic, and/or discourse-pragmatic …

Argument coding splits such as differential (= split) object marking and split ergative marking
have long been known to be universal tendencies, but the generalizations have not been …

Languages vary in how they signal “who does what to whom”. Three main strategies to
indicate the participant roles of “who” and “whom” are case, verbal indexing, and rigid word …

This paper surveys the occurrence of gender and numeral classifiers in the languages of the
world and evaluates statistically whether there is a complexity tradeoff between these two …

This paper investigates universal and areal structures in the lexicon as manifested by
colexification patterns in the semantic domains of perception and cognition, based on data …

Efficiency is central to understanding the communicative and cognitive underpinnings of
language. However, efficiency management is a complex mechanism in which different …

The present paper can be viewed as an extension of the theory of differential argument
encoding developed in Aissen (1999, 2003). We maintain Aissen's hypothesis that the …

This paper deals with the influence that nominal and verbal parameters have on DOM in the
diachrony of Spanish. Comparing selected corpus studies, I will focus first on the different …