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Syntactic Relations in Western Muskogean: A Typological Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Pamela Munro and
Lynn Gordon
Pamela Munro
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Lynn Gordon
Affiliation:
Washington State University
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Abstract

The Western Muskogean languages Chickasaw and Choctaw have a subject/oblique opposition in nominal case-marking and syntactic relations, despite their ‘active’ system of pronominal agreement. In both languages, case assignment may reflect the operation of productive relation-changing rules. These facts call into question the classification of Choctaw by R. Van Valin and W. Foley (e.g. 1980) as ‘role-dominated’. Restrictions on NP density (the number of nominal arguments per clause) may account for some of the syntactic differences between the more familiar ‘reference-dominated’ languages and languages of the Western Muskogean type.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 1982, pp. 81 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by the Linguistic Society of America

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