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.
References
- Alves, Mark J. 2000. A Pacoh analytic grammar. Ph.D. dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.
- Bender, Byron W. 2002. In Memoriam, Stanley Starosta 1939-2002. Oceanic Linguistics Volume 41, Number 2, December 2002. 255-274.
- Indrambarya, Kitima. 1994. Subcategorization of Verbs in Thai. Ph.D. dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.
- Jeong, Hy-Sook Rhee. 1992. A valency subcategorization of verbs in Korean and Russian: a lexicase dependency approach. Ph.D. dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.
- Kikusawa, Ritsuko. 2000. Reconstructing the actancy systems of Proto-Central Pacific and its daughter languages: ergativity, accusativity and their diachronic development. Ph.D. dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.
- Liao, Hsiu-chuan. 2004. Transitivity and Ergativity in Formosan and Philippine Languages. Ph.D. dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.
- Sak-Humphrey, Channy. 1996. Khmer nouns and noun phrases: a dependency grammar analysis. Ph.D. dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.
- Savetamalya, Saranya. 1989. Thai nouns and noun phrases: a lexicase analysis. Ph.D. dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.
- Starosta, Stanley. 1985. Mandarin Case Marking: a Localistic Lexicase Analysis. In Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 13, 215-266.
- Starosta, Stanley. 1988. The case for Lexicase: An outline of lexicase grammatical theory. Open Linguistics Series, ed. by Robin Fawcett. London: Pinter Publishers.
- Starosta, Stanley. 2001. Dependency grammar and monostratal transfer. In Language matters: In honour of Professor C. Ramarao, ed. by B. Vijayanarayana, K. Nagamma Reddy, and Aditi Mukherjee, 127–154. Hyderabad: Centre for Advanced Study in Linguistics, Osmania University, and Booklinks Corporation.
- Starosta, Stanley. 2006. Lexicase revisited. Encyclopedia of languages and linguistics. Pergamon Press.
- Starosta, Stanley. 2008. Dependency grammar and lexicalism. In An international handbook of contemporary research, ed. by Vilmos Ágel, Ludwig M. Eichinger, Hans-Werner Eroms, Peter Hellwig, Hans Jürgen Heringer, and Hening Lobin. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
- Trask, R. L. 1993. A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics. London: Routledge.
- Wilawan, Supriya. 1993. A reanalysis of so-called serial verb constructions in Thai, Khmer, Mandarin Chinese, and Yoruba. Ph.D. dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.