23.4022, Review: Semantics; Syntax: Croft (2012)

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Subject: 23.4022, Review: Semantics; Syntax: Croft (2012)

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Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:02:35
From: Peter Arkadiev [alpgurev at gmail.com]
Subject: Verbs

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Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-1788.html 

AUTHOR: William Croft
TITLE: Verbs
SUBTITLE: Aspect and Causal Structure
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2012

Peter M. Arkadiev, Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, 
Moscow


SUMMARY

The new book by William Croft has been awaited by the linguistic community for 
more than a decade, some preliminary chapters of it having appeared on the 
author's website as early as in 2000. The book itself stems from and hinges upon 
William Croft's work on argument structure and verbal semantics dating back to the 
early 1980s. In this book Croft summarizes his ideas about the structure of events 
and argument expression, which have been familiar to the linguistic audience at 
least since Croft 1991 and have been further developed in his later publications such 
as Croft 1998, and presents a fully-fledged general theory of event structure. 
However, the book under review is by no means just an elaboration and summary of 
older ideas, but contains a detailed and coherent presentation of a largely novel and 
promising theoretical framework coupled with an insightful analysis of a rich body of 
data (mainly from English), as well as an illuminating critical discussion of many of 
the existing approaches to event structure and argument realization. Though the 
conceptual basis of the book is shaped by the "functional" cognitive linguistic trend 
of thought (in particular, Construction Grammar), Croft bases many of his insights 
and proposals on the results achieved in the "formal" grammatical frameworks, and 
especially acknowledges the impact of Levin & Rappaport Hovav (2005) on the 
development of his ideas (p. xiii). The book is dedicated to the memory of Melissa 
Bowerman (1942-2011).

The main body of the book consists of nine chapters. In the first chapter 
("Introduction", pp. 1-30), the main problems discussed in the book, viz. verbal 
meaning and its relation to the realization of arguments and to constructions in 
which verbs appear, are presented together with a brief discussion of the major 
types of existing approaches to semantics, among which Croft chooses the 
Cognitive Grammar approach with its geometrical diagrammatic representations. 
(Here it is worth noting that graphic representations play a very important role in the 
book, which necessarily means that some important aspects of Croft's theory 
cannot be adequately reflected in the review.) Other issues tackled in the 
introduction include the cognitive linguistic notions of frame and construal (the latter 
understood as language-particular structuring of the extralinguistic experience in 
semantic terms) and the problem of grammatical relations and constructions. 
Following his own earlier work (e.g. Croft 2001), Croft proposes to abandon the 
notion of "global" grammatical relations such as subject, object etc. in favour of 
construction-specific grammatical relations, which may be different both across 
languages and across different constructions within one language.

Chapters 2-4 mainly deal with aspectological issues. In chapter 2 ("The aspectual 
structure of events", pp. 31-69) Croft discusses the existing approaches to the 
classification of event types ("lexical aspect") and points out their empirical 
problems and conceptual drawbacks. Croft revises the traditional Vendlerian 
classification of event types and proposes the following more fine-grained system 
(p. 45 and section 2.4.1):
a. Four types of states: inherent (permanent) states ("be Polish"), acquired 
permanent states ("be cracked"), transitory states ("be ill"), and point states ("it is 5 
o'clock").
b. Two types of activities: directed activities (for "degree achievements" such as "to 
cool") vs. undirected activities ("to walk").
c. Two types of achievements: reversible achievements ("the door opened twice") 
vs. irreversible achievements ("the mouse died (*twice)").
d. Two types of accomplishments: incremental accomplishments ("to write a letter") 
vs. non-incremental accomplishments ("to repair a computer").
e. Cyclic achievements (semelfactives, "to cough").

As a formal framework for the analysis of aspectual types Croft proposes a two-
dimensional geometric representation involving the temporal and the qualitative axes 
and modeling the presence and type of qualitative change as it occurs in time. 
Alternative aspectual construals of predicates are represented as combinations of 
the aspectual contour of the predicate with the aspectual profiling imposed by the 
tense-aspect constructions (discussed in chapters 3 and 4). Thus the English 
"inceptive state" verb "see" implies both a transitory state of seeing profiled by the 
present tense and the punctual event of entering into this state profiled by the 
simple past. The two-dimensional geometric representation allows Croft to motivate 
his typology of aspectual types, in particular to link three types of states (acquired 
permanent, transitory, and point states) to three types of achievements (denoting 
entry into these states, viz. irreversible, reversible and cyclic achievements, 
respectively) and two types of activities (directed and undirected) to two types of 
accomplishments (incremental and non-incremental, respectively).

In chapter 3 ("Change, boundedness, and construal", pp. 70-126), various issues 
pertaining to the aspectual behaviour of predicates are discussed from a cognitive 
viewpoint. Croft starts with the discussion of the notion "directed change", linked to 
such well-known theoretical concepts as "incremental theme" and "scale" and 
forming an aspectual supercategory encompassing directed achievements, directed 
activities and both incremental and non-incremental accomplishments. Further Croft 
proposes to distinguish between two types of boundedness: qualitative boundedness 
(q-boundedness) and temporal boundedness (t-boundedness). Q-boundedness is 
inherent to the lexical semantics of the predicate and corresponds to the familiar 
notion of telicity as involving a "natural endpoint" and the result state of an event. T-
boundedness implies the profiling of both the initial and the final endpoints of an 
event in a particular tense-aspect construction, without indication as to whether the 
result state has been achieved or even implied by the aspectual contour of the 
predicate. A large part of the chapter (section 3.2) is devoted to the discussion of 
the aspectual construals available to different English verbs, and notably of the 
ways lexical and encyclopedic semantics of predicates affects and constrains their 
aspectual potential. In this section the issue of the three existing approaches to 
meaning variation (polysemy, derivation and vagueness) is raised for the first time in 
the book (see below), and is resolved in favour of a cognitive usage-based approach 
in which the aspectual potential of the verb depends on "asymmetries in the 
frequency of use of one aspectual construal over another" (p. 91). Several 
mechanisms of aspectual construal are identified, viz. aspectual selection or 
metonymy "found with those predicates that allow either a directed achievement 
construal or a transitory (resulting) state construal" (p. 93), "structural 
schematization" found with cyclic achievements (e.g. "The light flashed") construed 
as undirected activities (e.g. "The light flashed for five minutes"), and "scalar 
adjustment" involving coarse-grained  and fine-grained conceptualizations of the 
same event found, e.g., with disposition predicates: the activity construal in "He is 
being polite" is fine-grained whereas the inherent state construal in "He is polite" is 
coarse-grained. This latter kind of alternative construal is applicable to various 
aspectual types. Special subsections are devoted to an insightful analysis of 
auxiliary and adverbial aspectual constructions in English and to a nice account of 
aspectual types and aspectual construals of Russian verbs based on secondary 
data.

In chapter 4 ("The interaction of grammatical and lexical semantics: quantitative and 
qualitative analyses", pp. 127-172), Croft approaches the mutual affinities and 
tensions between lexical and grammatical aspect from both cross-linguistic and 
language-internal perspective. A re-evaluation of the well-known typology of 
temporal-aspectual categories of Dahl 1985 is based on the "multidimensional 
scaling" approach to cross-linguistic data (Croft & Poole 2008) and yields some non-
trivial results, such as e.g. the existence of a typologically valid present 
imperfective cluster and the lack of a sharp cross-linguistic separation between 
perfective and perfect. With respect to the "alignment" of grammatical and lexical 
aspect Croft's findings more or less confirm the expectation that qualitatively 
unbounded situations (activities and state) would gravitate towards the imperfective 
while qualitatively bounded situations more often occur with the perfective aspect. 
The second part of the chapter is devoted to a detailed description of the basic 
tense-aspect constructions of English (Present Tense, Simple Past Tense, 
Progressive, Perfect) and "of the range of variation in aspectual potential of English 
verbs across" these constructions (pp. 145-164) followed by a multidimensional 
scaling analysis of the interaction of lexical and grammatical aspect in English and 
Japanese (pp. 165-171). It must be said that the role the of Japanese data in this 
section is not entirely clear, especially since no genuine Japanese examples are 
provided. The major outcome of the analysis is the spatial model of English and 
Japanese lexical aspect in fig. 4.4 on p. 166 showing a circular arrangement of 
major aspectual types from transitory states to directed achievements to directed 
activities to undirected activities to cyclic achievements to inactive actions and 
back to transitory states. Croft concludes (p. 169-171) that "the 
perfective/imperfective distinction in grammatical aspects corresponds to an 
opposition" (p. 169) of aspectual types involving, respectively, transitory states and 
directed achievements, on the one hand, and activities and cyclic achievements, on 
the other. These apparent paradoxes are resolved under the assumption (cf. 
chapters 2 and 3) that state and directed achievement result from different profiling 
of the common directed aspectual contour, and that cyclic achievement and iterative 
and undirected activity are different instantiations of the undirected aspectual 
contour.

In chapters 5 and 6 Croft switches to the construction of a force-dynamic theory of 
argument realization, expanding his own earlier proposals from Croft 1991 and 1998. 
Chapter 5 ("Toward a force-dynamic theory of argument realization", pp. 173-219) 
starts with a critical evaluation of some of the existing approaches to argument 
realization, showing empirical and conceptual problems of theories operating with 
semantic (thematic) roles and their hierarchies, as well as limitations of such event-
based accounts as Dowty's (1991) proto-role approach. Croft's own proposal hinges 
upon Talmy's (1988) notion of force-dynamic relations and already mentioned Croft's 
earlier work. Instead of (generalized) semantic roles and their hierarchies, realization 
of arguments such as subject, object and different kinds of obliques is determined 
by the causal force-dynamic structure of the event and its profiling by the verbal 
predicate. The major innovation to the earlier theory proposed in the book is the 
integration of causal and aspectual representations of event structure in a 
tridimensional space where each participant in the event is associated with its own 
subevent characterized by an aspectual contour, and force-dynamic relations link 
these subevents rather than participants themselves. The unity of event is secured 
by the fact that its subevents, having distinct qualitative dimensions, share a 
common temporal axis.

Chapter 6 ("Causal structure in verbal semantics and argument realization", pp. 220-
282) elaborates on the theoretical postulates of the previous chapter and explores 
their consequences from a cross-linguistic perspective. A large part of the chapter is 
devoted to the discussion of various kinds of construal of predicate relations which 
either are noncausal (spatial and possessive) or show noncanonical (cyclic or 
branching) causal chains (mental events, reflexive, reciprocal and comitative 
situations). Other issues approaches in this chapter include voice, alignment 
(accusative, ergative and active), causative and applicative constructions, and a 
diachronic typology of case syncretisms elaborating on Croft's earlier distinction 
between two types of oblique semantic relations, which he calls antecedent (those 
which precede the object in the causal chain, e.g. instrument) and subsequent 
(those which follow the object in the causal chain, e.g. beneficiary or goal), and the 
generalization that case markers in languages will not conflate relations from 
different domains. A tentative conceptual space for participant roles uniting both 
causal and noncausal (spatial and intentional) relations is proposed in fig. 6.2 on p. 
280.

In chapter 7 ("The interaction of aspect and causal structure in verb meaning", pp. 
283-319) the force-dynamic theory of argument realization is integrated with the 
theory of event structure and aspect developed in chapters 2-4. The overall 
aspectual type of a complex event consisting of several subevents each with its 
own aspectual contour is determined by the following principle (p. 286): "the 
aspectual type of the overall event is the type of the subevent that ranks highest in 
the (…)" Verbal Aspectual Hierarchy : "directed change > undirected change > 
state." Intralinguistic and cross-linguistic differences in the lexicalization of complex 
events are discussed, such as the well-known distinctions between result verbs and 
manner verbs and between verb-framing and satellite-framing type of lexicalization, 
which in Croft's view are largely dependent on the presence of the directed change 
component in the predicate's semantics. The chapter contains many interesting 
observations about the behaviour of different verbs and constructions in English.

The last two chapters of the book are devoted to the interaction of verbal semantics 
with different constructions. In chapter 8 ("Complex predicate constructions and the 
semantics of simple verbs", pp. 320-357), various kinds of constructions are 
discussed which express complex events whose structure exceeds the limits 
imposed by the "constraints on the semantic structure of simple verbs -- 
nonbranching causal chain, temporal unity, a single directed change subevent" (p. 
320). Constructions discussed include the English and Japanese resultative 
constructions, which receive a very detailed and insightful treatment, depictive, 
serial verb and converb constructions. Croft concludes the chapter by observation 
that simple verbs prototypically encode maximally individuated events, a notion 
linked to the well-established transitive action prototype (Hopper & Thompson 1980).

In chapter 9 ("Verb meaning and argument structure constructions", pp. 358-393) 
Croft returns to the issue of the semantic interaction of verbs and argument 
structure constructions and the problem of polysemy, derivation and vagueness 
approaches to this interaction. English ditransitive and locative constructions and 
verbs appearing in them are analysed in great detail. Croft argues that it is not 
possible to completely disentangle the semantic contributions of verbs and 
constructions and arrive at their "basic" or "unitary" meanings and that the contrast 
between a lexical rule analysis and a constructional analysis is a false dichotomy 
(cf. Croft 2003). Instead, Croft proposes to analyze verb-specific and narrow verb-
class specific constructions fully specified for particular semantic features and draw 
generalizations from them. A usage-based exemplar model of verb + construction 
meaning is developed on pp. 383-392, which hinges upon token frequency of co-
occurrences of particular verbs and constructions.

In the short "Envoy" (pp. 394-395), Croft briefly summarizes the main results of his 
study and urges the reader that since his argumentation was mostly based on the 
data from English, the generalizations proposed must be evaluated against broad 
cross-linguistic data.

The "Glossary of terms" (pp. 397-407) is a welcome and useful addendum. 

EVALUATION

Croft's "Verbs" is undoubtedly a very important book for all linguists interested in 
aspect, event structure, argument realization and verb semantics. The book 
develops a whole new theory of event structure, comprising many of the core issues 
of the semantics-syntax interface, such as constraints on the lexical semantic 
structure of simple verbs, linguistic situation types and predicate classes, 
interaction between lexical and grammatical aspect and between verbal and 
constructional semantics, thematic roles and argument realization, voice and 
various complex predicates, polysemy of case markers etc. Though the 
argumentation is largely based on data from English, the discussion is typologically 
well-informed and in many aspects draws upon cross-linguistic generalizations 
(including those made by the author himself).

The theory presented in the book is a first coherent and all-encompassing 
conception of event structure and argument realization in cognitive linguistics, 
couched in a usage-based constructional approach to semantics and syntax and 
sophisticated enough to challenge the other existing theories of these phenomena, 
especially those developed in the "formalist" tradition. Croft can only be praised for 
doing justice to competing approaches and for incorporating many of their insights 
into his own conception instead of simply rejecting them as "aprioristic" or 
"reductionist." The book, in addition to presenting the author's own ideas, contains 
detailed and useful summaries and discussions of many of the existing approaches 
to the phenomena in question, where both strong and weak points of different 
proposals as well as their similarities and differences with Croft's own theory are 
highlighted. Finally, many pages of the book are devoted to a really illuminating 
analysis of a various English data, ranging from verbal aspect to intricacies of 
resultative constructions. All this makes the book a fascinating reading rewarding 
both theory-oriented and empirically-oriented audiences.

However, every important contribution to science has some weak points, and Croft's 
book is no exception. My major criticism concerns Croft's failure to take into 
account some of the important recent (and even not so recent) proposals in the 
domain of aspect and event structure, which are in some respects parallel to Croft's 
approach. 

In his discussion of aspectual types in chapter 2, Croft ignores the approach to 
event types and aspectual classes proposed by Sergei Tatevosov (2002), as well as 
Tatevosov's critical survey of various proposals in this domain. This is indeed 
unfortunate, since Tatevosov has developed a cross-linguistically applicable non-
aprioristic theory of aspectual types allowing to analyze data from any human 
language and to arrive at directly comparable results. In addition, several of Croft's 
"new" aspectual types, such as e.g. "inceptive states", have been already 
recognized by Tatevosov as "cross-linguistic actional classes" supported by data 
from many languages. This is also important because Croft's own approach to 
aspectual types does not seem to be conceptually or methodologically superior to 
Tatevosov's; Croft does not actually explain how his methodology of arriving at 
event types and aspectual classes is constrained, whether the event types and 
aspectual classes he postulated for English can be extended to other languages and 
how such an extension can be achieved in a non-circular and non-aprioristic way. 
This leads him to saying that "there is in fact an indefinitely large number of 
predicate classes each having its own unique aspectual potential or range of 
possible aspectual construals" (p. 57), which is not a very desirable result, since 
linguistic theory must instead constrain possible predicate classes, and this is 
precisely what Tatevosov's approach does (see especially Tatevosov 2010, where 
cross-linguistic hypotheses about possible aspectual classes and language-specific 
systems of aspectual classes are proposed).

The second recent proposal in the domain of event structure which Croft fails to take 
into account is the work by Gillian Ramchand (2008), which, though couched in the 
generative syntactic framework, is in many ways parallel to Croft's functional 
cognitive theory. Like Croft, Ramchand proposes an integrated theory of aspect, 
event structure and argument realization, where each event participant is associated 
with its own subevent represented as a node in the syntactic tree linked to a specific 
semantic interpretation; the relations between different participants and subevents of 
the same event in Ramchand's system are causal in nature, thus resembling Croft's 
force-dynamic relations. Similarly to Croft, Ramchand is concerned with the issue of 
what constrains the semantic potential of simple verbs and with such constructions 
as causative, resultative etc. A critical evaluation of Ramchand's theory and its 
comparison with his own would have constituted a highly relevant part of Croft's 
book.

The third major piece of pertinent work ignored by Croft (and, unfortunately, by many 
of his colleagues) belongs to the Russian linguist Elena Paducheva, who has 
developed a sophisticated derivational theory of event structure and aspect (basing 
mainly on the Russian data), in many respects similar to that of Croft's (including 
parallels in graphic representations of event types). The relevant publications in 
English include Paducheva 1995, 1997, 1998, 2003 (see 
http://lexicograph.ruslang.ru/03MembersPadu.htm); among the important insights 
made by Paducheva is the recognition of the principled correlation between 
predicate classes and semantic types of verbal arguments, cf. Croft's cursory 
remarks on p. 378 of his book.

Further, in many parts of the book Croft fails to take into account and refer to the 
recent important work on the problems he is dealing with. Work which should have 
been considered include Carlota Smith's papers on English tense and aspect, e.g. 
Smith 1978 and Smith 1986, in section 4.3 on the basic tense-aspect constructions 
in English; the major typological work (e.g., Nedjalkov ed. 2007) on reciprocals and 
reflexives, their semantics, polysemy, diachrony and expression across languages 
in section 6.2.3.2; recent insights in the semantics of comitative constructions and 
comitative relations by Alexandre Arkhipov (2009); recent developments in the 
typology of the so-called "active/stative" languages (Donohue & Wichmann eds. 
2008) in section 6.3.1; recent proposals concerning transitivity such as Næss 2007 
and Malchukov 2006. All these lacunae are rather unfortunate; not invalidating 
Croft's own proposals, they nevertheless make them weaker and less supported by 
the existing body of data and literature than desired.

There are not many errors and typos in the book, and I will point out only those 
which pertain to the data. On p. 121 the Russian verb 'be interested in' is 
'interesovat'sja,' not 'interesovat,' and the alleged Russian verb grančit' 'cut, facet' 
does not exist. On p. 193 the notation from Wunderlich 1997 is mixed up: 
accusative must be specified as [+hr], not [+lr], while the ergative is assigned [+lr], 
not [+hr]. In the Turkish ex. (90b) on p. 267 a wrong accusative case marker 
appears. In the Finnish ex. 85 on p. 317 GEN instead of PRTT must appear in the 
glosses; in addition, the abbreviations list on pp. xvi-xvii does not contain PART and 
PRTT.

To conclude, the new book by William Croft, despite certain drawbacks and 
weaknesses, is a major contribution to linguistic theory, which should be read by all 
linguists interested in aspect, event structure, and argument realization, regardless 
of particular theoretical frameworks they adhere to. The book is rich in ideas and 
empirical data and is written in a persuasive and appealing fashion, making it a 
fascinating and smooth reading.

REFERENCES

Arkhipov, Alexandre. 2009. Comitative as a cross-linguistically valid category. In: 
New Challenges in Typology: Transcending the Borders and Refining the 
Distinctions, Alexandre Arkhipov and Patience Epps (eds.), 223-246. Berlin, New 
York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Croft, William. 1991. Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations. The 
Cognitive Organization of Information. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago 
Press.

Croft, William. 1998. Event structure in argument linking. In: The Projection of 
Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors, Miriam Butt and Wilhelm Geuder 
(eds.), 1-43. Stanford: CSLI.

Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in 
Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Croft, William. 2003. Lexical rules vs. constructions: a false dichotomy. In: 
Motivation in Language: Studies in Honour of Günter Radden, Hubert Cuyckens, 
Thomas Berg, René Dirven and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds.), 49-68. Amsterdam, 
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Croft, William & Keith T. Poole. 2008. Inferring universals from grammatical 
variation: multidimensional scaling for typological analysis. Theoretical Linguistics 
34. 1-37.

Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.

Donohue, Mark & Søren Wichmann (eds.). 2008. The Typology of Semantic 
Alignment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 
67(3). 547-619.

Hopper, Paul J. & Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and 
discourse. Language 56(2). 251-299.

Levin, Beth & Malka Rappaport Hovav. 2005. Argument Realization. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.

Malchukov, Andrei. 2006. Transitivity parameters and transitivity alternations: 
Considering co-variation. In Case, Valency and Transitivity, Leonid I. Kulikov, Andrei 
L. Malchukov and Helen de Hoop (eds.), 329-358. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John 
Benjamins.

Næss, Åshild. 2007. Prototypical Transitivity. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John 
Benjamins.

Nedjalkov, Vladimir P. (ed.) 2007. Reciprocal Constructions. Vols. 1-4. Amsterdam, 
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Paducheva, Elena. 1995. Taxonomic categories and semantics of aspectual 
opposition. In: Temporal Reference, Aspect and Actionality, Pier-Marco Bertinetto, 
Valentina Bianchi, Östen Dahl, James Higginbotham and Mario Squartini (eds.), Vol. 
I, 71-90. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.

Paducheva, Elena. 1997. Verb categorization and the format of a lexicographic 
definition. In: Recent Trends in Meaning-Text Theory, Leo Wanner (ed.), 61-74. 
Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Paducheva, Elena. 1998. Thematic roles and the quest for semantic invariants of 
lexical derivation. Folia Linguistica 31(3-4). 349-363.

Paducheva, Elena. 2003. Lexical meaning and semantic derivation: the case of 
image creation verbs. In: Second International Workshop on Generative Approaches 
to the Lexicon. May 15-17, 2003, Geneva, 230-237.

Ramchand, Gillian C. 2008. Verb Meaning and the Lexicon. A First-Phase Syntax. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Carlota. 1978. The syntax and interpretation of temporal expressions in 
English. Linguistics and Philosophy 2(1). 43-99.

Smith, Carlota. 1986. A speaker-based approach to aspect. Linguistics and 
Philosophy 9(1). 97-115.

Talmy, Leonard. 1988. Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive 
Science 12. 49-100.

Tatevosov, Sergei. 2002. The parameter of actionality. Linguistic Typology 6(3). 317 
-401.

Tatevosov, Sergei. 2010. Akcional'nost' v leksike i grammatike [Actionality in 
Lexicon and Grammar.] Unpublished Habilitation Thesis, Moscow State University.

Wunderlich, Dieter. 1997. Cause and the structure of verbs. Linguistic Inquiry 28(1). 
27-68. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER 

Peter M. Arkadiev, PhD in linguistics (2006), is a senior research fellow 
in the Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics of the 
Institute of Slavic studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an 
assistant professor at the Centre for Linguistic Typology of the Institute 
of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities, 
Moscow. His main interests are linguistic typology with a focus on case 
marking and argument structure and its formal realization, and tense-
aspect-modality. He works mainly on Lithuanian and Adyghe.



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