Structural case and dependency marking: a neo-Jakobsonian view

description Jan-Wouter Zwart. Structural case and dependency marking: a neo-Jakobsonian view. Proceedings from the Parasessions of the Forty-second Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Volume 42-2, p. 77-92. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
type Conference proceedings article.
ID 2006e | 127 | first version April 2006; final version July 13, 2006; published in 2009.
origin Paper presented at the Case and Voice parasession of CLS 42 (April 7, 2006) and written up for the proceedings. The general idea was presented earlier in talks in 2003-2004, excluding the stuff on tripartite case systems.
keywords case; dependency; structural case; object case; ergativity; tripartite case; animacy
summary This paper proposes to describe structural case as the morphological expression of a dependency between sisters (i.e. as a function of Merge). The subject's sister is a dependent of the subject and realizes it via case and agreement on one or more if its terms. The ergative pattern results when the subject has an inherent case, assuming that case can only be used to express dependency if the nondependent is part of a structural case opposition. The paper then focuses on tripartite case systems, and argues that the accusative there marks animacy rather than case.
related full text
Presentations: CLS 42, 04/2006; Nijmegen, 04/2004; Harvard, 11/2003
Publications: Complementizer agreement and dependency marking typology, Local agreement
Unpublished: The first case (MA-thesis, 1988).

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