New Perspectives on Case Theory (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: New perspectives on case theory ed. by Ellen Brandner and Heike Zinsmeister Sergey Evtyukhin New perspectives on case theory. Ed. by Ellen Brandner and Heike Zinsmeister. (CSLI lecture notes 156.) Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2003. Pp. 376. ISBN 1575863642. $27.50. Case and its role in the language system are commonly considered among the most important issues of modern generative linguistics. The current volume offers a number of analyses of various case-related phenomena in different languages within different frameworks. It is a collection of talks given at the annual meeting of the German Society for Linguistics in spring 2000. Artemis Alexiadou (‘On nominative case features and split agreement’) challenges the hypothesis that UG aligns specific cases with specific projections and proposes an analysis that unifies several properties common to DPs in Icelandic and Hebrew. She suggests that different DPs check nominative case in different projections (T as well as Aspect). The analysis also accounts for ergative case systems. Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (‘Case systems: Beyond structural distinctions’) provide a unified analysis of case systems in two ergative languages, Georgian and Urdu, and argue that a division of case systems into ergative and accusative is insufficient for understanding the case system of a language. They argue that both syntactic and semantic information should be taken into account for the analysis of these two case systems and that case markers themselves have semantic content. Eric Haeberli (‘Categorial features and the source of EPP and abstract case phenomena’) proposes a motivation for the EPP and abstract case and analyzes these categories in terms of feature matrices that must interact in a clause in order to be licensed. Jóhannes Gisli Jónsson (‘Not so quirky: On subject case in Icelandic’) refines his earlier observations of subject case in Icelandic. He notes that there are semantic restrictions on nonnominative subjects in Icelandic and that two types of lexical case must be recognized. Marcus Kracht (‘Against the feature bundle theory of case’) argues against the view that case is a bundle of features and introduces a hierarchical ‘stacked’ representation of case. Diane Nelson (‘Case and event structure in Finnish psych predicates’) discusses the idea that there is a link between case and the event structure of the predicate as a whole. Halldór Ármann Sigurđsson (‘Case: Abstract vs. morphological’) argues that deep case is universal and morphological case is a PF phenomenon and that these two types of case can act independently. Ralf Vogel (‘Surface matters: Case conflict in free relative constructions and case theory’) discusses case conflicts in free relative constructions and the implications of this phenomenon for the theory. He uses an optimality-theoretic approach to derive a hierarchy of case systems. The last paper in this volume is by Ellen Woolford (‘Burzio’s generalization, markedness, and locality constraints on nominative objects’). It discusses a recent approach to Burzio’s generalization, which states that the object gets nominative case when there is no nominative subject available. The author argues that markedness plays a role here and that nominative is a less marked case. Exceptions are explained by other constraints ranked higher than case. Sergey Evtyukhin Michigan State University Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America