Toward a Phase Account of Dependent Case

Proceedings of the First Central European …, 2012

The main idea suggested in this paper is that subordinate clauses need to be Case licensed (namely embedded under KPs) and that various patterns of "fusion" within a layered functional skeleton obliterate that process. I will provide two types of empirical support for this proposal. First, I will show that this proposal correctly allows for nominal elements to stand in for a whole embedded clause (using the mechanism of Phrasal Spell-Out, Starke 2009; Neeleman & Szendroi 2007). Second, I will show that a wide range of typologically unrelated languages overtly exhibit Case marking on complementizers. Also, direct evidence against the identity of relative pronouns and complementizers / subordinators, possibly suggested -prima facie- by the layered model proposed here, will be provided here with the aid of data from Akkadian, Germanic languages and West Iranian languages.

Language, 2010

The book under review is a collection of twelve papers in honor of Bernard Comrie. 1 Though the genre of a festschrift does not impose rigid thematic restrictions, especially when the festschriftee is a scholar who has contributed to as many diverse areas of linguistics as Bernard Comrie has, the title Case and grammatical relations is indeed justified. All of the contributions to the volume (except the one by Maria Polinsky) deal with various issues having to do either with morphological case, or with various properties of grammatical relations, or with both.

2008

Russian Linguistics, 2018

In recent years, two theories have been advocated in the syntactic literature with respect to case assignment mechanisms, and this paper tests them based on new empirical material from Russian. One theory, advocated by Woolford and others, is Inherent Case Theory (ICT), which views case as an overt reflection of a relationship between a given noun phrase and a (usually functional) head. The other theory, known as Dependent Case Theory (DCT) and advocated most recently by Baker and Bobaljik, views case as a reflection of a relationship between noun phrases in a given structural domain. In this paper, we test the two theories against the findings of two experimental studies conducted by us on eventive nominalizations in Russian. In such nominalizations, transitive / agentive subjects are marked by the instrumental, whereas objects / internal arguments are marked by the genitive. We call into question whether in these types of nominalizations, an agentive subject that is not accompanied by an internal argument that needs a case is marked by the instrumental (as predicted by ICT) or the genitive (as predicted by DCT). Having tested this in two experimental studies, we argue that only one of these theories, the ICT, can account for our empirical findings in a complete and coherent way. This work has benefited greatly from discussions with (in alphabetical order) M.

In Martin Everaert, Marijana Marelj, and Eric Reuland (eds.), Concepts, Syntax and their Interfcae. MIT Press. 2016, 2016

After briefly presenting the distribution of the Romanian genitival agreeing particle al and the most important results of the previous research, I compare three recent analyses of al that are based on the idea that al is essentially a genitive marker and make use of a K (Case) projection: (I) al is a complex of functional heads (K-P+Agr) in the extended projection of the possessee; (II) al is a K head that forms a constituent with the genitive DP; (III) al is an Agr morpheme projected at PF by a genitival K head that forms a constituent with the genitive. I first compare analysis (I) with analyses (II)-(III) and conclude that analysis (I), although it offers a straightforward explanation for agreement, is contradicted by some distributional facts which indicate that al and the genitive form a constituent. Moreover, it needs an important modification in order to account for the fact that al-genitives can appear outside DPs, in predicative position. Analyses (II) and (III), in which al forms a constituent with the genitive, do not have these empirical problems, but require some modifications of the current minimalist assumptions about structural case in order to deal with the alternation between al and prepositional genitives. I then compare analyses (II) and (III) and I conclude that (II) is preferable because it can account for the loss of agreement of al in some varieties of Romanian.

2013

This chapter discusses the notions of morphological (surface) case and abstract Case, showing the empirical and theoretical motivation for each. The discussion of morphological case presents the dimensions of cross-linguistic variation found in this domain, and outlines the main tendencies in the expression of case. The notion of abstract Case is used to predict the distribution of overt and non-overt nominal forms, and is considered one of the fundamental abstract syntactic relations in linguistic theory. The chapter presents a brief survey of theoretical approaches to Case in formal grammar and then discusses the main ways of modeling Case in nominative-accusative and ergative languages. 1. Morphological case, abstract Case, and the need for Case Theory Certain constituents in clause structure are known to determine the form and/or position of other clausal constituents. In particular, verbs and adpositions determine the morphological form of their associated nouns. For example, i...

Dative case on indirect objects (IO) in Lithuanian is preserved under passivization, which is not the case with dative direct objects (DO) of monotransitive verbs, suggesting that the two datives are not alike. Although DAT-to-NOM conversion is taken as an indicator of structural case, we show that DO datives behave differently from DOs bearing structural accusative in that the former exhibit inherent case properties as well (see also Anderson 2015). We develop an account for the contrast between the two datives by using two types of derivational mechanisms: structure-building features, triggering Merge, and probe features, triggering Agree (Heck & Müller 2007; Müller 2010). This study demonstrates that structural vs. non-structural conversion can be dependent on not only how case is assigned but also on the Voice system of a language (in line with Alexiadou et al. 2014). We argue that the DO dative in Lithuanian is in fact non-structural. Even though the result of DAT-to-NOM conversion is structural nominative case, the derivation is different from that of structural ACC-to-NOM conversion.