Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar

By E. Keenan, B. Comrie. 2008

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Dependency-Based Construction of Semantic Space Models (2007, background): “It assigns a value of 1 to paths of length 1 and fractions to longer paths: A more linguistically-informed path value function can be de(cid:2)ned by taking into account the obliqueness hierarchy of grammatical relations (Keenan and Comrie 1977).”
Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies (2009, background): “A case in point may be the existence of languages, e.g., Austronesian languages, in which relativization is restricted to the subject position, hence crossing over an intervening subjec tn ever arises ( Keenan and Comrie, 1977 ).”
REANALYSIS IN ADULT HERITAGE LANGUAGE (2011, background): “…that this grammar, although divergent from the grammar of the baseline language, is consistent with the universal constraint on relative clause formation noted by Keenan and Comrie ( 1977 ): If a language limits its relativization to a subset of argument positions, it has to relativize subjects.”
Sign-Based Construction Grammar: An Informal Synopsis (2012, methodology): “For verbs, the order of elements on the ARG-ST list corresponds in the main to that of the ‘Accessibility Hierarchy’ of Keenan and Comrie (1977), where the first NP is the verb’s subject, the second NP (if there is one) is the verb’s direct object, etc.”