Direction and Obviation in plains Cree: A Referent Systems Approach

Abstract

We present a calculus in which the variables occurring in semantic representations are associated with morphosyntactic information, and the semantic composition of two representations consists in the identification of variables with matching morphosyntactic information. Importantly, shared morphological information can lead to the identification of variables irrespective of the order of composition. This flexibility, we argue, is an important advantage in analysing the syntax-semantics interface of languages like Plains Cree, where the person and number properties of the arguments as well as the assignment of semantic roles to arguments is almost exclusively determined by the complex morphological properties of the verb.