Turkic genitive case and agreement asymmetries
Deniz Satik
August 2020 

Significantly revised. Baker and Vinokurova (2010) and Baker (2015) present a two-modality approach to case assignment, in which different cases may be assigned in one of two ways: either configurationally, as in Marantz (1991), where case is assigned depending on its location and its relationship with other nominals in its domain, or assigned via agreement with functional heads, as in Chomsky (2000). In particular, they argue that the assignment of nominative and genitive case cannot be assigned configurationally based on agreement patterns in Sakha, a Siberian Turkic language. In the spirit of Levin and Preminger (2015), I argue that needing to posit two different modalities of case is not necessary, and that their data can be accounted for with one. However, unlike Levin and Preminger (2015) who provide purely theoretical arguments in favor of their conclusion, I provide four empirical arguments for genitive case being assigned as an unmarked case (and, by extension, nominative) not just in Sakha, but other Turkic languages as well.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004981 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted
keywords:	turkic, turkish, sakha, genitive, case, agreement, default, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [April 2020] v1 [January 2020]
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