@inproceedings{watty-etal-2025-case,
    title = "Case Syncretism in Kasavakan {P}uyuma: A Field Data Analysis of Noun Phrase Markers",
    author = "Watty, Deborah  and
      Yao, Yung-Jui  and
      Watty, Jens N.",
    editor = {Jablotschkin, Sarah  and
      K{\"u}bler, Sandra  and
      Zinsmeister, Heike},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 23rd International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, SyntaxFest 2025)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.tlt-1.8/",
    pages = "64--73",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-291-6",
    abstract = "Previous research has reported differing patterns of case syncretism across three dialects of Puyuma, an Austronesian language of Taiwan (Nanwang, Katipul, Ulivelivek). This study presents a quantitative analysis of case syncretism of noun phrase markers and disambiguation strategies in the Kasavakan dialect. Our dataset comprises 377 sentences elicited from five speakers, which we annotated for voice, potential semantic ambiguity, word order, and case marking of different semantic roles. We find evidence for a high degree of syncretism between genitive and nominative markers, alongside a decline in the use of genitive forms, particularly for common definite nouns. Some overlap with oblique markers is also attested, suggesting varying degrees of case syncretism between speakers. Topicalization appears to be the most frequent disambiguation strategy, while the order of non-topicalized noun phrases does not seem to aid disambiguation. Other factors, including age and individual experiences may contribute to inter-participant variation. These findings contribute to a more complete understanding of case marking in Puyuma by adding new empirical data from the Kasavakan dialect, where patterns of syncretism and disambiguation differ from previously described varieties."
}