Birchall Joshua Thomas Rigo. Argument Marking Patterns in South American Languages

LOT, 2014. — 285 p. — ISBN: 978-94-6093-000-3.This is the first comprehensive cross-linguistic study of argument marking patterns in South American languages. It looks specifically at how the relations between a predicate and its semantically obligatory participants—its arguments—are expressed in basic main clause constructions. Languages often treat different semantic types of arguments identically in one or more grammatical processes, forming syntactic argument roles based on the valency of the predicate. Argument roles can further be treated identically across predicate classes of different valencies, forming grammatical relations such as subject, direct object, indirect object, absolutive and ergative. These grammatical relations are central to most linguistic theories and feature prominently in the descriptions of most languages. The argument roles under consideration here are those formed by the overt morphological marking of clausal participants through indexation and case marking.