11 - Encoding Asymmetries of Grammatical Categories

Summary

Finally, Chapter 11 is concerned with alternating pairs of constructions, such as active and passive clauses and singular and plural nouns, which are commonly analyzed as paradigmatic alternatives of particular grammatical categories such as voice and number. Crucially, paradigmatic alternatives of this type are often asymmetrical in the sense that the less frequent member of an alternating pair of constructions is marked by an extra morpheme (e.g., a voice or number marker). Linguistic typologists refer to this asymmetry by the notion of markedness and have argued that frequency accounts for the occurrence of the extra marker. Chapter 11 presents a network analysis of the encoding asymmetries of grammatical categories based on research from typology and psycholinguistics. While the proposed account applies to a large number of categories (e.g., voice, number, tense, aspect, case), the chapter is primarily concerned with a phenomenon known as differential object marking, which has played a key role in recent typological and psycholinguistic research on grammatical relations.