Grammatical Case & Syntactic Structure

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Abstractions about how languages encode grammatical relations and structure, covering case- and alignment-marking systems (absolutive case, ergative-absolutive alignment, polypersonal agreement), morphosyntactic categories (grammatical person, morpheme, demonstrative), and syntactic dependency phenomena (crossover effects, preposition stranding, operator).

18 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Absolutive case — Mark the sole argument of an intransitive clause and the patient-like argument of a transitive clause alike in an ergative-absolutive alignment, contrasting them with the transitive agent.
• Agreement (linguistics) — A grammatical dependency in which one expression’s form covaries with person, number, gender, case or another feature of a related controller.
• Anceps — A position in quantitative poetic meter that may be realized by either a long or a short syllable under the meter's rules.
• Captative verb — A denominal verb whose lexical meaning is obtaining, gathering, catching, or hunting the referent named by its base.
• Crossover effects — Binding restrictions that arise when a moved phrase crosses a coreferential pronoun, with strong and weak forms depending on grammatical relation and representation.
• Demonstrative — A deictic expression such as this or that that identifies a referent relative to a contextual center or discourse location.
• Disjunct (linguistics) — A clause-peripheral adjunct that comments on the proposition, its evidential status or the speaker’s manner or attitude rather than modifying its described event.
• Ergative–absolutive alignment — A morphosyntactic alignment grouping an intransitive subject with a transitive object and treating the transitive agent differently.
• Grammatical person — A grammatical category indexing participants by their relation to the speech event, commonly speaker, addressee and others.
• Hindustani declension — The inflectional system by which Hindi–Urdu nouns, pronouns and agreeing postpositions mark number, gender, vocative and case-related forms.
• Morpheme — The smallest linguistic unit that participates in a systematic form–meaning or form–grammatical-function relation within a language.
• Morphological parsing — Analysis of a word into morphemes together with their lexical identities, grammatical features, and combinatorial structure.
• Operator (linguistics) — In generative grammar, an expression that participates in an A-bar dependency and binds or licenses an interpreted variable position.
• Polypersonal agreement — A grammatical system in which a verb indexes features of more than one argument, such as subject, direct object, indirect object, or beneficiary.
• Preposition stranding — A syntactic configuration in which a preposition is separated from its selected complement, often after movement or ellipsis.
• Quotative — A grammatical marker that introduces represented speech, thought, or stance while preserving the quoted utterance’s deictic form.
• Stylometry — Quantitative inference about authorship or style from measured patterns in language or other symbol-producing behavior.
• Word order — The linear arrangement of syntactic constituents through which languages encode or constrain grammatical relations, information structure and discourse effects.