Is There Syntactic Inversion in Ojibwa

It has been argued that Algonquian languages feature subject-object “inversion” (Rhodes 1979; Perlmutter and Rhodes 1988; Anderson 1982, 1984). This is a operation inverting the relative grammatical relations of the subject and object. The inversion analysis has mainly been motivated by patterns of morphology appearing on the verb. However, what has been described in the literature as subject-object inversion often does not involve syntactic movement of the object to subject position. Instead, some apparent instances of subject-object inversion arise from split patterns of case assignment, and/or from morphological fusion of the features of subject and object (Marantz 1989, Halle and Marantz 1993). The morphological facts of Algonquian can also be captured under such an account.