The syntactic basis of referential hierarchy phenomena: clues from languages with and without morphological case

An attempt is made to gain a general understanding of how referential hierarchy phenomena work morphosyntactically. Languages with and without morphological case turn out to adopt rather different strategies for dealing with the demands that referential hierarchies place on their clause structure. An investigation of Kashmiri (with morphological case) and Northern Tiwa (without case) indicates that at least two factors influence the morphosyntactic manifestation of hierarchy phenomena: a structural association that appears to exist between referential features of clitics and agreement and inflectional structure on the one hand, and the competing demands on inflectional structure from Nominative agreement vs. high ranking referential features on the other. A consideration of these two factors contributes to an understanding of why certain hierarchy phenomena take the form they do, why different strategies are used in different types of languages to avoid violations of the hierarchy, and the role that morphological case marking can play in hierarchy phenomena.