Marking of Patient Noun Phrases (Feature 57)
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Feature Annotation
Here we look at the marking of the patient argument in typical transitive clauses (’David killed Goliath’, ‘The girl picked the flower’, ‘The dog chased the cat’, etc.), i.e. what is often called direct object.
Often pronouns are treated differently from full noun phrases. Here we only look at (non-pronominal) full noun phrases.
Moreover, we only consider the contrast between no marking and adpositional marking/case-marking (ignoring patient marking by agreement/cross-referencing on the verb, if present). Note that word order is ignored as well (for word order, see Feature 1).
In some languages, patient marking is optional. For this feature, optional marking is treated like obligatory marking, i.e. “is marked” means ‘can be marked or must be marked’.
Additional remarks
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Values
| Value | Value Annotation | |
| 1 | No marking of patient NPs | Haitian Creole |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Only definite patient NPs are marked | Modern Hebrew |
| 3 | Only animate patient NPs are marked | Spanish |
| 4 | Only definite and animate patient NPs are marked | Choose this value if only patients that are both definite and animate are marked, or if only definite patients and animate patients are marked. In other words, choose this value if both definiteness and animacy is a relevant condition for patient marking (e.g. Hindi). |
| 5 | All patient NPs are marked | Hungarian |
WALS No.
(23) (Partial)
