ISSN: 2306-5737E-ISSN: 2658-4069
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana
Transactions of the Institute for Linguistic Studies
ISSN: 2306-5737E-ISSN: 2658-4069
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana
Transactions of the Institute for Linguistic Studies 

Case morphology, syntactic categories and taxonomy of case forms

Lyutikova Ye. A. Padezhnaya morfologiya,sintaksicheskiye kategorii iproblema klassifikatsii padezhey. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 652.
The paper investigates the explanatory power of feature-based approaches to case [Pesetsky, Torrego 2001, 2004; Matushansky 2008, 2010], namely, of the view that case morphology spells out agreement of the nominal constituent with the governing head(s) in the syntactic category [Pesetsky 2013; Lyutikova 2015], in accounting for East Caucasian data. The paper aims at showing that this approach derives the two oppositions that characterize case systems of East-Caucasian languages: the opposition of the direct (nominative) vs. oblique cases and the opposition of grammatical (nominative, ergative, affective etc.) vs. semantic cases.These oppositions are found not only in peculiarities of case morphology, but also concern syntactic properties of noun phrases bearing a specific case morpheme. Thus, nominative is usually morphologically unmarked, whereas other case morphemes attach to the stem mediated by the oblique stem marker. In several East-Caucasian languages, attributive modifiers show concord with the head noun in the obliqueness: they distinguish between the direct form, which is used with the nominative head, and the oblique form, which is used otherwise. Besides, nominative noun phrases show syntactic transparency for many operations: only nominative noun phrases are transparent for focus, question, constituent negation markers, as well as for semantic binding and other A-bar dependencies. On the other hand, there is a bunch of grammatical properties that distinguish between grammatical and semantic cases. Thus, grammatical cases are licensed in the verbal domain exclusively; they cannot be used to encode an argument of a noun, and, consequently, never get substantivized. Grammatical cases and nominative also differ from semantic cases in that the former participate in case alternations in structurally modified contexts, such as nominalizations, biabsolutive constructions, causative constructions.The proposal yields a three-way distinction inside the category of case. In addition to the contrast between nominative and oblique cases (which is syntactically represented as ungoverned vs. governed nominal), it derives the distinction between “verbal” cases (ergative, affective and possessive) and other, “postpositional” cases. Thus, we obtain the taxonomy very similar to that of [Bittner, Hale 1996], which distinguishes structurally deficient and unmarked nominative (DP), marked structural cases (KaseP with an empty head) and inherent cases (KaseP with a lexically specified head). In the proposed system, however, licensing of nominative and ergative is not dependent on higher functional structure of the clause (I and C), which is a desirable result.
Keywords
case theory, ergativity, case stacking, East Caucasian languages, Tsakhur
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Keywords
case theory, ergativity, case stacking, East Caucasian languages, Tsakhur
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