Case Patterns



Ellen Woolford

University of Massachusetts





Standard Case licensing principles are not designed to handle
 situations in which the Case of an argument depends on factors
 other than the features of the local head, such as how many
 additional arguments are present and what Cases those other
 arguments have. These problematic valency and dependency
 phenomena can be handled if violable markedness and faithfulness
 constraints are added to Case Theory.



Examples of such problematic Case phenomenon include the
 prohibition on accusative Case licensing on an object when there
 is no external subject (Burzio's generalization) or when the
 subject has dative or ergative Case. Dative and ergative Case
 licensing may also be prohibited when no other argument is
 present in the clause. Previous attempts to solve such problems
 placed restrictions on accusative Case licensing (Burzio 1986,
 Woolford 1993), or ordered/ranked the Case assignment rules (Yip,
 Maling, and Jackendoff 1987, Legendre, Raymond, and Smolensky
 1993). The approach proposed here retains the standard Case
 licensing principles as universal and inviolable, accounting for
 dependency and valency effects, and other cross-linguistic
 differences in Case patterns with a supplementary set of ranked,
 violable markedness and faithfulness constraints. Whenever there
 is a choice of licensed Cases for a particular argument (a
 situation which occurs frequently), the violable constraints
 determine which Case will surface. Markedness constraints prefer
 less marked Cases such as nominative over more marked Cases such
 as accusative or ergative. Faithfulness constraints require the
 realization of lexical Cases licensed by certain verbs.
 

Under this approach, dependency effects follow from markedness.
 Unaccusative constructions, and all other contexts in which it
 appears to be necessary to block accusative Case licensing, turn
 out to be situations in which either nominative or accusative
 Case can be licensed on the object; nominative is selected
 because it is the less marked Case. Restrictions on the
 distribution of ergative or dative Case to transitive Clauses or
 to particular aspects is the result of the interaction of
 markedness and faithfulness constraints, including faithfulness
 constraints that are contextually restricted. 



The same set of violable constraints accounts for the surface
 inventory of Cases used in a particular language. All languages
 license the same Cases, but not all Cases surface.