This Monday (May 23), alumna Vera Gribanova (PhD 2010; Stanford) will present in S-CIRCLE on “Case, agreement, and differential subject marking in Uzbek”:
In this talk I use novel evidence from Uzbek nominalized clauses to distinguish between two competing approaches to case licensing. Baker and Vinokurova (2010) have argued that two modalities of case licensing are necessary to account for the entire range of case patterns in Sakha (Turkic) embedded clauses. One modality is structural licensing of noun phrases by matching of phi and case features on functional heads via agree (Chomsky, 2000, 2001). A second is configurational case assignment (Marantz, 1991 et seq.), in which a noun phrase is assigned case on the basis of the head that c-selects it or on the basis of that phrase’s position with respect to other noun phrases in the same clause. Baker and Vinokurova’s (2010) argument for the necessity of structural case assignment via AGREE with a functional head rests crucially on evidence from Sakha nominalized clauses, in which structural subjects receive genitive case marking: genitive on subjects is licensed if and only if there is also subject agreement, and vice versa. Levin and Preminger (2015) have argued against the position that such evidence forces the use of AGREE via a functional head for case licensing, and provide a purely configurational account of the same set of facts.
Two syntactic factors determine the distribution of genitive case in Uzbek nominalized clauses. First, the position of the subject internal to its nominalized clause matters: it can stay low (spec vP) and receive nominative case, or raise to a higher position ([Spec, DP] of the nominal shell) and receive genitive case. Second, the position of the entire clause containing that subject in the broader context of the matrix clause matters: genitive case is only ever available in clauses which are arguments of verbs or nouns, but never within adjunct clauses. Subject agreement inside the embedded clause remains obligatory throughout. Inside those clauses where genitive is permitted, it serves as a differential subject marker and comes with interpretive effects (specificity).
This state of affairs provides us with enough evidence to differentiate between the two accounts of case. I demonstrate that structural case licensing via AGREE can model the above pattern, while the configurational case assignment theory (as it stands) cannot. In the latter part of the talk, I investigate how the configurational case theory would need to be modified to deal with the facts; the discussion gives rise to a significantly different view of differential subject marking in which the genitive, although homophonous with the genitive case, it actually the exponent of a movement relation (like focus or topic marking). I then explore what kinds of crosslinguistic predictions this makes for situations in which apparent case markers actually mark both a derived position for the relevant argument, and the differential status of an argument.
The talk will take place at 2 pm in the Cave.
