This book is a considerably revised version of my 2004 doctoral dissertation from the
university of Nijmegen, entitled Transitivity: from semantics to structure. Everything stated in …

The present paper presents a cross-linguistic overview of animacy effects in (differential)
case marking, and provides an explanation for the attested patterns in terms of two …

This dissertation shows how languages differ in their morphosyntactic sensitivity to
variations in the semantics of direct objects. Whereas some languages reflect semantic …

Two strategies of case marking in natural languages are discussed. These are defined as
two violable constraints whose effects are shown to converge in the case of differential …

The book examines the impact of verbal semantics–telicity and affectedness, mostly–on
differential object marking (DOM) in Spanish. It presents two studies providing empirical …

Publisher Summary This chapter describes how a model of case marking based on the two
functions of case should be augmented with the notion of argument strength and shows how …

Radboud University Nijmegen e subject and the object in a transitive clause should be
distinguishable. We discuss five different ways in which distinguishability can be obtained:(i) …

As is well known, in some languages only certain direct objects (DOs) are marked by an
object marker, while other DOs remain unmarked. Since Bossong (1985) this phenomenon …

The phenomenon of case has long been a central topic of study in linguistics. While the
majority of the literature so far has been on the syntax of case, semantics also has a crucial …

The aim of this article is to account for tense/aspect and mood based differential subject and
object marking. We propose an analysis in terms of an optimization procedure between two …