This dissertation shows how languages differ in their morphosyntactic sensitivity to variations in the semantics of direct objects. Whereas some languages refle

While there are languages that code a particular grammatical role (e.g. subject or direct object) in one and the same way across the board, many more languages

Not all sentences encode their subjects in the same way. Some languages overtly mark some subjects depending on certain features of the subject argument or the

Based on data from a wide range of languages, the book discusses the ways in which case interacts with meaning.

Differential argument marking has been a hot topic in linguistics for several decades, both because it is cross-linguistically widespread and because it raises