The nanosyntax of Case
One of the assumptions frequently made in works on case is that cases are composed of various features. I argue that these features are universal, and each of them is its own terminal node in the syntactic tree. Individual cases thus correspond to phrasal constituents built out of these terminals.
I introduce a mechanism for the spell out of these highly articulate structures (following Starke's unpublished work). A central idea is that individual morphemes spell out phrasal constituents of varying size, and that their insertion is governed by the Superset Principle. I show that phrasal spell out is both empirically required, and theoretically beneficial: it simplifies the overall architecture of grammar.
With the technicalities in place, I introduce the so-called Peeling theory of case, which allows for one case to sub-extract from within another case. I close with a proposal that addresses the possible semantic contribution of individual features.
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