Lexicase

Lexicase is a type of dependency grammar originally developed beginning in the early 1970s by Stanley Starosta at the University of Hawaii (Starosta 1988, Trask 1993). 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) (Bender 2002).

Lexicase is a mononstratal (i.e. it is not a transformational grammar) X-bar grammar in which words are the heads of their own phrases (i.e. there are no assumed empty phrases) (Starosta 1988, Starosta 2006). In Lexicase, words have features that determine the morphosyntactic distribution of their dependents (Starosta 2001, Starosta 2008). 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 and Russian (Jeong 1992), Thai (Wilawan 1993 and Indrambarya 1994), and noun subcategories in Khmer (Sak-Humphrey 1996) and Thai (Savetamalya 1989) and to provide an overall language description of Pacoh, spoken by a hilltribe in central Vietnam (Alves 2000). Regarding arguments and clause structure, it has been used to explore case in Greek (Acson 1979) and Mandarin Chinese (Starosta 1985) and transitivity and ergativity in Amis, spoken by an indigenous group in eastern Taiwan (Liao 1998) and in Proto-Central Pacific Austronesian (Kikusawa 2000), among other other topics.

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