The Case Split and Pronominal Arguments in Choctaw † *

This paper extends the ideas expressed in the previous paper (Auxiliaries and Ergative Splits) to the Muskogean language Choctaw, originally spoken in the Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana regions of the United States and now spoken mainly in Oklahoma and Mississippi. The paper develops the idea that the hierarchies of arguments that determine case splits are easily explained in these languages as cases where real arguments are pronouns, which show a nominative/accusative pattern, and the marking of subject/ oblique case with lexical case is limited to DP adjuncts.