Overview

This book deals with the category of case and where to place it in grammar. The crux of the debate lies in how the morphological expression of grammatical function should relate to formal syntax. In the generative tradition, this issue was addressed by the influential proposal that abstract syntactic Case should be dissociated from the morphological expression of case. The chapters in this book deal with a number of key issues in the ongoing debates that have emerged from this proposal. The first part discusses the modes that we need for structural case assignment, and how Case would relate to a theory of parameters. In the second part, contributors explore the division of labour between structural and inherent case, synchronically and diachronically, while the third part investigates individual cases and how they can illuminate case theory. The chapters discuss a wide range of phenomena, including differential object marking (DOM), global case splits, prepositional genitives and other prepositional phrases, nominative infinitival subjects, nominalizations of deponent verbs, and three-place predicates. They also draw on data from a variety of languages and language families, such as Hindi, Lithuanian, Kashmiri, Kinande, Greek, Hiberno-English, Romance, and Sahapatin.

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9780198865926

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Christina Sevdali is a Senior Lecturer at Ulster University. She studied at the University of Crete and obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2007. She works on the syntax of Ancient Greek as well as the diachrony of Greek, in particular the loss of infinitives and changes in the Greek case system. She was the principal investigator on two AHRC projects: 'Investigating Variation and Change: Case in Diachrony' and 'Language Awareness in Key Stage 3'. She has published her work in journals such as Syntax, Language, and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Dionysios Mertyris is a Researcher at the Research Centre for Modern Greek Dialects (Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek), Academy of Athens. He specializes in historical linguistics, dialectology, and the diachrony of the Greek language. His PhD thesis (La Trobe University, 2014) deals with the loss of the genitive case in Greek from a diachronic and dialectological perspective. He worked on the AHRC project 'Investigating Variation and Change: Case in Diachrony'. Elena Anagnostopoulou is Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Crete. Her research interests lie in theoretical and comparative syntax, formal linguistic typology, morphology, and historical morphosyntax, focusing on the interfaces between syntax, morphology, and the lexicon, argument alternations, Case, Agreement, person, gender, clitics, control, and anaphora. In 2013 she received a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in recognition of her past accomplishments in research and teaching and since 2019 she has been an elected member of the Academia Europaea.

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