The subject agreement–accusative case connection in Turkish

Abstract

This article is on the relationship between case and agreement. A noun phrase is assigned the structural case that it bears through agreement with a functional head. Several recent works assume this thesis, referred to as the George and Kornfilt Thesis, as a basic premise to provide an account of structural case assignment. The central thesis of the article is that there is at least one more dependency that needs to be assumed in case phenomena, namely that, in some languages of the world, structural object case, or more particularly accusative case, is dependent on subject agreement—the Subject Agreement–Accusative Case Conjecture. The article proposes the Jump-start Hypothesis in order to explain this dependency. According to this hypothesis, in a finite construction, case assignment to each argument is activated by a single source of agreement. The argumentation relies on data from Turkish nominalizations and restructuring infinitives.