Syntax of Case

In this class, we will examine three families of syntactic proposals that use the word "case" and make predictions about nominal licensing and nominal morphology:

• a. Abstract case, as first suggested by Vergnaud, and
  developed in Chomsky's "Lectures on Government Binding" and
  related work.


• b. Dependent case, as proposed by Marantz, developed
  further by Bobaljik and others, and exemplified in a recent interesting
  paper by Baker and Vinokurova.


• c. Case as a morphological reflection of Merge, as
  suggested by Matushansky and developed in a different way in my own recent
  work on Russian.

I will argue (1) that some version of all three of these proposals is correct, (2) that dependent case is really Binding Theory in disguise, and that (3) the reason these independent systems all seem to converge on the notion "case" is that (in many languages, at least) they invoke morphology that competes for a single slot on the noun. In other respects, however, these notions are distinct.

Relevant readings include:

Background (fairly elementary)

Pesetsky, David and Esther Torrego. 2009.. (pedagogical chapter on case) for Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism (Cedric Boeckx, ed.), to appear.

Dependent Case

Marantz, Alec. 2000. Case & Licensing In Arguments and Case: Explaining Burzio's Generalization. Edited by E. Reuland. Amsterdam: Joan Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 11-30

Bobaljik, Jonathjan. 2008 Where's phi? Agreement as a Post-Syntactic Operation" In Harbour et al. Phi Theory. Oxford:OUP

Baker, Mark and Nadya Vinokurova.2008 Two modalities of case assignment: case in Sakha unpublished ms., Rutgers.

Case as reflection of merge

Matushansky, Ora. 2007 A case study of predication. unpublished ms., Utrecht.

Pesetsky, David. 2008 [current handout about Russian case morphology here]

Relevant to dependent case as binding theory (though not about that topic at all!)

Everaert, Martin. 1991. Nominative anaphors in Icelandic: Morphology or syntax. In Issues in Germanic syntax, ed. Werner Abraham, Wim Kosmeijer, and Eric J. Reuland, 277 – 305. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. On the anaphor-agreement effect Rivista di Linguistica 2:27 – 42.

Woolford, Ellen. 1999. More on the anaphor-agreement effect Linguistic Inquiry 30:257-287.

Because time will be very short, some topics will be given short shrift, but my hope is to cover the Baker-Vinokurova paper, my own work on Russian, and the binding-theory data in sufficient detail to motivate a few important ideas -- and to give a meaningful overview of the rest.

Audience: Solid knowledge of basic generative syntax will be helpful, but this topic does not require huge amounts of specialized knowledge beyond that.

Web site: There will be a class website with links to all readings (not just the ones linked here). URL to be announced.