Lexicase

Lexicase is a type of dependency grammar originally developed beginning in the early 1970s by Stanley Starosta at the University of Hawaii.[1] Dozens of Starosta's graduate students also contributed to the theory and wrote at least 20 doctoral dissertations using Lexicase to analyze numerous languages of Asia (Japanese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, Tagalog, etc.), Europe (Greek, Russian, etc.), and Africa (Swahili and Yoruba).[2]

Lexicase is a monostratal X-bar grammar (i.e. it is not a transformational grammar) in which words are the heads of their own phrases (i.e. there are no assumed empty phrases).[3] In Lexicase, words have features that determine the morphosyntactic distribution of their dependents.[4] A primary goal of Lexicase is to provide a simple, transparent, disprovable means of testing cross-linguistic tendencies.

As a lexically focused theory, Lexicase has been used to identify verb subcategories in Korean,[5] Russian, Thai,[6] and Vietnamese,[7] and noun subcategories in Khmer[8] and Thai[9] and to provide an overall language description of Pacoh in central Vietnam.[10] Regarding arguments and clause structure, it has been used to explore case in Greek[11] and Mandarin Chinese[12] and transitivity and ergativity in Amis, an indigenous language in Taiwan[13] and in Proto-Central Pacific Austronesian,[14] among other topics.

  1. ^ See Starosta 1988, the main text of the theory. See Trask 1993 for a historical summary.
  2. ^ See Bender 2002.
  3. ^ Described in Starosta 1988 and Starosta 2006.
  4. ^ See Starosta 2001 and Starosta 2008.
  5. ^ Jeong 1992
  6. ^ Wilawan 1993 and Indrambarya 1994.
  7. ^ Clark 1978.
  8. ^ Sak-Humphrey 1996.
  9. ^ Savetamalya 1989.
  10. ^ Alves 2000.
  11. ^ Acson 1979.
  12. ^ Starosta 1985.
  13. ^ Liao 1998.
  14. ^ See Kikusawa 2000.