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International Conference on Formal Grammar

FG 2018: Formal Grammar 2018 pp 37–61Cite as

Case Theory in Minimalist Grammars

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10950))

Abstract

This paper investigates the consequences of one-to-many licensing relationships for Minimalist Grammars (MGs; [30]) on the example of case. Dependent Case Theory [2, 23] has proposed that a single noun phrase can assign accusative case to arbitrarily many other noun phrases in particular structural configurations. Taking a licensing view rather than an assignment view on the distribution of case, this implies that accusative case can be licensed by a single licensor on arbitrarily many licensees. This paper argues that the distribution rules for case can be formalized as at most monadic second-order constraints, which are known to be translatable into an MG with refined Merge-features [16]. However, an implementation as Move-features is not feasible because such an MG would need to “count” and would thereby generate non-regular derivation tree languages. It is argued that this increase in complexity can be avoided by suspending the SMC for licensing relationships that involve neither displacement of phonological nor of semantic features.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Language differ with respect to restrictions on the licensing nominals, in particular with respect to their case marking. In many languages, nominals with inherent case cannot be licensors (“quirky subjects”, e.g. in Icelandic [34], Diyari, Kannada [2]). If the subject carries dative, the object will carry nominative, not accusative. However, Tamil as well as some dialect of Faroese exhibit dat–acc patterns [2, pp. 187–194], and some dialects of Kurdish allow erg-marking on the subject if the object carries inherent dat [1], as is also found in Warlpiri, Burushaski, and Ingush [2, pp. 187–194]. In this paper, I will model the Icelandic patterns, but everything I say extends straight-forwardly to the Faroese pattern.

  2. 2.

    It has been argued [20, 21] that unmarked cases are the morphological marking that arises in the absence of case. In this paper, I take unmarked cases to be assigned and licensed like other cases.

  3. 3.

    [20, 21] argue that only case-less NPs (carrying unmarked case) can license dependent case. If this is correct, the daisy-chain configuration for case assignment does not exist, and these structures employ the 1:n-configuration instead where all assignment is performed by NP\(_1\).

  4. 4.

    They do not, however, provide an example showing that both NPs lose their accusative-marking together.

  5. 5.

    [28, p. 205] brings up the idea that dependent cases are feature values that are assigned in the presence of the licensing NP, but does not spell out how this might proceed.

  6. 6.

    For linguistic arguments in support of this approach, see the feature indeterminacy problems discussed in [8,9,10].

  7. 7.

    This is a welcome result. MSO can capture many patterns that we do not expect to find in the case distribution in natural language. For instance, MSO-logic can implement modulo-counting, i.e., for a sequence of NPs, the case of the NP depends on its position in the sequence modulo some integer.

  8. 8.

    This follows the traditional formalization of DCT [23]. More recently, data have shown that erg–erg–abs patterns are unattested [2, 24] and realized as erg–abs–abs instead. This paper does not aim to contribute to this issue.

  9. 9.

    We could even reduce this to a single lexical item per noun. This is irrelevant for the formalism because the blow-up to the lexicon is constant and thereby negligible, but it does have linguistic significance. Given that the phonological content of a potential licensor virtually never changes with respect to whether it is a licensor or not (J. Bobaljik, p.c.), we would not like our formalism to employ accidental homophony to capture this because doing so would allow us to derive non-homophonous pairs of licensors, thereby overgenerating with respect to the linguistic data. We have two options to capture this systematic syncretism. The first one is to assume a generative lexicon that contains entries of the one type (either licensors or not) and derives entries of the second type. The second option is to introduce a rule that deletes +Acc from a nominal and applies optionally, (i), and to add the scheme for production rules in (ii) to our MG.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Jonathan Bobaljik, Thomas Graf, Tim Hunter, Stefan Kaufmann, Jos Tellings, and Susi Wurmbrand, as well as to three anonymous reviewers for Formal Grammar, and two anonymous reviewers for the NASSLLI Student Session for helpful feedback and stimulating discussions. All errors are my own.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA

    Sabine Laszakovits

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  1. Sabine Laszakovits
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  1. IRISA, Université de Rennes 1, Rennes, France

    Annie Foret

  2. Institut für Linguistik, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Sachsen, Germany

    Greg Kobele

  3. LORIA/Inria Nancy, Villers-lès-Nancy, France

    Sylvain Pogodalla

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Laszakovits, S. (2018). Case Theory in Minimalist Grammars. In: Foret, A., Kobele, G., Pogodalla, S. (eds) Formal Grammar 2018. FG 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10950. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-57784-4_3

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