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
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