Syntactic Relations in Western Muskogean: A Typological Perspective

Abstract

The Western Muskogean languages Chickasaw and Choctaw have a subject/oblique opposition in nominal case-marking and syntactic relations, despite their ‘active’ system of pronominal agreement. In both languages, case assignment may reflect the operation of productive relation-changing rules. These facts call into question the classification of Choctaw by R. Van Valin and W. Foley (e.g. 1980) as ‘role-dominated’. Restrictions on NP density (the number of nominal arguments per clause) may account for some of the syntactic differences between the more familiar ‘reference-dominated’ languages and languages of the Western Muskogean type.