Падежное маркирование в русских событийных номинализациях: ингерентный или зависимый падеж

Abstract

In recent years, two theories have been advocated in the syntactic literature with respect to case assignment mechanisms, and this paper tests them based on new empirical material from Russian. One theory, advocated by Woolford and others, is Inherent Case Theory (ICT), which views case as an overt reflection of a relationship between a given noun phrase and a (usually functional) head. The other theory, known as Dependent Case Theory (DCT) and advocated most recently by Baker and Bobaljik, views case as a reflection of a relationship between noun phrases in a given structural domain. In this paper, we test the two theories against the findings of two experimental studies conducted by us on eventive nominalizations in Russian. In such nominalizations, transitive / agentive subjects are marked by the instrumental, whereas objects / internal arguments are marked by the genitive. We call into question whether in these types of nominalizations, an agentive subject that is not accompanied by an internal argument that needs a case is marked by the instrumental (as predicted by ICT) or the genitive (as predicted by DCT). Having tested this in two experimental studies, we argue that only one of these theories, the ICT, can account for our empirical findings in a complete and coherent way.