Pronouns and case

Abstract

Subject—object distinctions in pronominal systems of languages like Dutch and English are not similar to nominative—accusative oppositions in languages with morphological case, since pronouns do not show the syntactic effects of morphological case. This does not mean that these pronominal distinctions are only relics of earlier stages with a richer inflection. In fact, they do show a fundamental distinction between what is sometimes called head marking (here: agreement) and dependency marking (here: case marking). Consequently, subjects are DPs and objects are extended with a Case Phrase. However, in languages like Dutch and English dependency marking is not morphologically specified, i.e. the head of the Case Phrase is empty. The special property of pronouns is that they are not just nouns, since they only contain functional information. They are organized in a paradigm and correspond to (or spell out) some higher, extended nominal projection. More specifically, Dutch and English object pronouns spell out the Case Phrase, whereas the subject pronouns in these languages correspond to a DP (licensed by agreement). As a result, object pronouns differ in form from subject pronouns. Ordinary nouns, containing lexical information, correspond to N. Since N can be present in subject as well as in object position, ordinary nouns can appear in both types of argument positions. Several peculiar characteristics of Dutch and English pronouns follow from this theory.