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The Nominative Puzzle and the Low Nominative Hypothesis

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Author

Summary, in English

Under the view of nominative Case taken by Chomsky (2000, 2001), one would expect nominative to be the marked or complex Case, being merged after accusative. In fact, however, it is the other way around, nominative preconditioning accusative and also being the Case of simple

structures (unaccusative, etc.). The article argues that this Nominative Puzzle is not real, the nominative argument in fact being the first argument merged, raised across the accusative later in the derivation for independent reasons. This approach not only accounts for the dependency

correlation between accusative and nominative (Burzio’s

Generalization), but also offers a derivational account of Condition A correlations (anaphors being merged higher than their ‘‘antecedents’’). Importantly, it also makes it possible to explain Icelandic quirky constructions

in terms of a general matching theory. In addition, the article develops a novel approach to Move as applying for the purpose of successful feature matching.

Department/s

Publishing year

2006

Language

English

Pages

289-308

Publication/Series

Linguistic Inquiry

Volume

37

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

MIT Press

Topic

  • Languages and Literature

Keywords

  • quirky Case
  • Move
  • Condition A
  • structural Case
  • Burzio’s Generalization
  • intervention

Status

Published

Research group

  • GRIMM

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1530-9150