| Abstract: | In this paper we explore the consequences of the hypothesis that Universal Grammar contains formal counterparts of extremely simple constraints like these: agents surface as subjects; low-prominence arguments do not surface as subjects or objects; low-'animacy' arguments surface as objects. Using Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1991, 1993) to formally manage the necessary violations of such constraints as they come into mutual conflict, we show that such simple universal principles governing the mapping of semantic roles to surface morphosyntactic roles can provide formal explanation of empirical cross-linguistic typologies of case and grammatical voice systems. |
