Taxonomies of case and ontologies of case
Omer Preminger
October 2020
 

This is a theoretical review paper of sorts, and it has several intertwined goals:
  1. To show what a system of configurational case assignment would look like when formulated in current syntactic terms (rather than the GB terms in which it was originally proposed, e.g. in Marantz's 1991 paper).
  2. To show that given (1), the proposal in Baker's (2015) book, to add case-assignment-under-phi-agreement to a configurational case system, is an empirically vacuous one. Everything it can account for can also be accounted for under a purely configurational system as construed in (1), with no appeal whatsoever to phi-features within the theory of case.
  3. To argue that the system in (1) is therefore sufficient to account for case, cross-linguistically. It is also necessary, in the sense that theories with no dependent-case component are unable to serve as general theories of case.
  4. To remind ourselves that one cannot argue against (3) by, e.g., presenting a language in which the-case-pretheoretically-identified-as-'accusative' doesn't conform to the predictions of dependent case. That would only work if descriptive labels like 'accusative' were guaranteed to carve out a natural class of grammatical phenomena, but there is no reason to believe that they do.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005463
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: to appear in an edited volume about case
keywords: case theory, configurational case in the 21st century, syntax
previous versions: v1 [September 2020]
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