| ROA: | 324 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Case Patterns |
| Authors: | Ellen Woolford |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 37 |
| Abstract: | 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. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |