In this project we survey the phonological and morphological properties of various grammatical markers:
• morpheme type: syntactic word (governing case, heading phrases, etc.) vs. formative vs. semi-word (incorporated stems) etc.
• fusion: phonological cohesion ranging from autonomous prosodic word to agglutination to various types of nonlinear morphology
• flexivity: various types of declension and conjugation class distinctions
• locus of marking: various types of head, dependent, detached (cliticized), positional marking
• position: post, prae, circum, etc. differentiating between prepositions and postpositions, prefixes and suffixes, etc.
• domain: domain with respect to which a marker is positioned post, prae, circum etc..
• behavior: inert (as with, say, Japanese case particles) vs. various kinds of spreading (e.g. within the NP like IE cases) and stacking (as in Suffixaufnahme), typologized in detail
• host restrictions: part of speech restrictions (allowing among other things, differentiating clitics from affixes)
• exponence: semantic features of the argument that are registered, e.g., its role, number, person, gender, etc. Roles are defined in a dedicated role definition file; inflectional categories are defined in the same definition file that is also relevant for the synthesis project.
We are currently focussing on a survey of TAM, CASE, NUMBER and PERSON markers. When such markers show heterogenous behavior in a language, we chose one examplar of these markers, following a standardized algorithm in line with the Exemplar-Based Method adopted by the AUTOTYP principles. The data file on grammatical markers also contains detailed information on those markers that are constitutive for complex NPs (genitives, possessor agreement, construct state marking etc.) surveyed in the NP structure project, and on markers relevant for syntactic constraint patterns.
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