Case, Word Order and Prominence

Book excerpt: Language users have access to several sources of information during the build up of a meaningful construction. These include grammatical rules, situational knowledge, and general world knowledge. A central role in this process is played by the argument structure of verbs, which establishes the syntactic and semantic relationships between arguments. This book provides an overview of recent psycholinguistic and theoretical investigations on the interplay between structural syntactic relations and role semantics. The focus herein lies on the interaction of case marking and word order with semantic prominence features, such as animacy and definiteness. The interaction of these different sorts of information is addressed from theoretical, time-insensitive, and incremental perspectives, or a combination of these. Taking a broad cross-linguistic perspective, this book bridges the gap between theoretical and psycholinguistic approaches to argument structure.