Formal Syntax and Semantics of Case Stacking Languages

In this paper the phenomenom of case stacking is investigated from a formal point of view. We will define a formal language with idealized case marking behaviour and prove that stacked cases have the ability to encode structural information on the word thereby allowing for unrestricted word order. Furthermore, the case stacks help to compute this structure with a low complexity bound. As a second part we propose a compositional semantics for languages with stacked cases and show how this proposal may work for our formal language as well as for an example from Warlpiri.