Some cases of Russian

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.

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...

Lingua, 2001

We consider two variants of morphological case: structural case (such as accusative, ergative, or dative), which is encoded by abstract case features reflecting the semantic ranking of arguments, and semantic case (such as instrumental or directional), which encodes an additional semantic relation to be licensed by the meaning of the verb. Individual verbs may be lexically marked for either structural or semantic case. We show how a correspondence-theoretic approach can successfully describe the various patterns of structural case found in German. We then discuss instances of double object where structural case and semantic case compete with each other: under certain circumstances semantic case is favored, while under other circumstances structural case is favored. We mainly consider two scenarios, described by the respective rankings of STRUCTURAL CASE (which requires all objects to be realized by a structural case) and UNIQUENESS (which restricts a structural case to occur at most once in a clause). In particular, we analyze the different options for structural vs. semantic case in the dialects of Quechua.

In Russian, there are a number of NP-like (or, in other terms, DP-like) phrasal elements that show a remarkable distribution: they can only occur in those positions where the direct cases-Nom(inative) or Acc(usative) are required, cf. Leonard Babby's Direct Case Condition (Babby 1980: 86ff, 162ff; 1985). Unlike the better known morphological case deficiency, e. g. in undeclinable loanwords like kofe 'coffee', taksi 'taxi' or Katmandu 'Kathmandu' which lack overt case endings but nevertheless can occupy any syntactic position available for overtly casemarked nouns, the syntactic case deficiency means that an element is ruled out everywhere except the contexts in which Nom or Acc are expected. The fact did not go unnoticed by researchers, and Babby in his 1985 paper summarized the most conspicuous cases and offered a unified explanation in line with his version of Case Theory within the Government and Binding framework (cf. also Babby 1987; 1988; 1991). Babby's theoretical strategy of "case conflict" resolution has, although in different forms, been employed in many later works on the case in Russian (Franks 1995; Richards 2007; Matushansky 2008; Pesetsky 2010). I will attempt to replace it with a simpler solution which makes no recourse to "case conflict", but instead distinguishes between the "NP and Case" requirements from lexical heads governing the oblique cases, and "Case only" requirements typical for both direct cases Nom and Acc. I hypothesize that the diversity of elements available in the direct case positions compared to those available in the oblique cases is so great because the "Case only" requirement is weak: not only a NP but any semantically plausible phrase can occur in a direct, i.e. structural, case position, and, if it is a NP, it must be in Nom or Acc. To achieve this, I will have to revise the categorial status of some phrases that Babby recognized as NPs. In section 1, I outline Babby's analysis; in section 2, I propose a more representative list of case-deficient elements and inquire further into their properties; and in section 3, I suggest a new hypothesis on the nature of Direct Case Condition. 1. Leonard Babby's (1985) approach Under Babby's Direct Case Condition, four major observations (i-iv) are subsumed: (i) "A NP in the scope of sentence negation can be marked with the genitive of negation [GenNeg] if and only if it would be in a direct case [Acc or Nom] if the sentence were not negated. The same is true of the partitive genitive" (Babby 1985: 107): (1) Nom and GenNeg: a. Pis'm-a prišl-i letter-PL.N came-PL 'Letters came.' b. Pisem ne prišl-o letter.PL.G not came-NT.3SG 'Letters did not come.'

Language and Information, 2007

Hee-Don Ahn and Sungeun Cho. 2007. Subject-Object Asymmetries of Morphological Case Realization. Language and Information 11.1 , 53-76. Case markers in Korean are omissible in colloquial speech. Previous discourse studies of Caseless bare NPs in Korean show that the information structure of zero Nominative not only differs from that of overt Nominative but it also differs from that of zero Accusative in many respects. This paper aims to provide a basis for these semantic/pragmatic properties of Caseless NPs through the syntactic difference between bare subjects and bare objects: namely, the former are left-dislocated NPs, whereas the latter form complex predicates with the subcategorizing verbs. Our analysis will account for the facts that (i) the distribution of bare subject NPs are more restricted than that of bare object NPs; (ii) bare subject NPs must be specific or topical; (iii) Acc-marked NPs in canonical position tend to be focalized.

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

On the Distinction between Syntactic and Semantic case, 1992

This thesis examines the distinction between syntactic case and semantic case, part of a broader distinction between lexical and functional elements. Several tests, involving predication, nominalization, and iteration are proposed for determining the semantic status of particular case functions. The results of these tests show that only subject and direct object markers are syntactic, all other cases being semantic. Further, semantic cases behave like adpositions, and should therefore be placed in the same syntactic category as them. This enables one to defend a structural account of restrictions on predication. The tests also indicate that English has underlying semantic cases, which are related, but not identical, to theta roles. The small number of syntactic cases is consistent with my claim that their content consists of one binary feature value, while the content of semantic cases is not necessarily so limited.

1995

As it is currently understood within P&P theory, the Case module appears to be a purely syntactic condition, contributing to regulating the syntactic distribution of argument noun phrases, and, in some versions of the theory, argument clauses. In most, or perhaps all, other theories of grammar, there is no equivalent. This paper