Summary
I have argued on the basis of Russian NPs containing a quantifier expression that NP-internal case agreement is determined by percolation of the abstract case assigned to the phrase's maximal projection Nm. Thus, while the head noun controls its modifiers' number, gender, and animacy, it does not determine their case; unlike other inflectional categories, case is a property of the NP as a whole, not of the head noun or the modifiers on which it is morphologically realized.
The Russian data cast serious doubt on one of the central assumptions of Government and Binding case theory, namely, that case distribution is exhaustively determined by structural relations between the case assigner and assignee (government and c-command), and that case conflicts result in ill-formed structures. We have seen in this paper that phrases with the same lexical items and X-bar structures may have different internal distributions of abstract case (cf. the heterogeneous vs. homogeneous case patterns in (19) and (20)) and that these differences in case distribution are due to the different types of case assigned to the NP (lexical vs. configurational) and to the resolution of the case conflicts that arise in these phrases (see the Syntactic Case Hierarchy in (51)). Case conflicts are a natural reflection of the hierarchical structure of human language, and the structures that contain them are perfectly well-formed; a case conflict results in an ill-formed structure only if it cannot be resolved in a principled way (e.g., see the discussion of the irresolvable conflict between two lexical cases in Babby (1984)).
The Russian data provide new evidence supporting Chomsky's distinction between abstract case and morphological case. Recall the ‘animate GEN’, which is the morphological realization of the abstract ACC case, in Argument IV, section 2. (See Babby (1984, 1985) for other examples of a ‘mismatch’ between abstract and morphological case.) Russian quantified NPs also demonstrate in a particularly striking way that complex, seemingly anomalous surface phenomena can in fact be shown to result from the interaction of a relatively small number of simple principles (see Chomsky 1986, p. 43).
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I would like to thank the many people whose comments and criticisms are reflected in this paper's final form. Special thanks go to J. Bowers, R. Brecht, W. Browne, C. Chvany, G. Corbett, W. Harbert, N. Hornstein, L. Janda, D. Lightfoot, I. Melchuk, G. Rappaport, A. Timberlake, and A. Zaenen. My warmest thanks also go to Steve Lapointe, who helped me tighten up my argumentation and who suggested adding section 2 to the final version of the paper.
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Babby, L.H. Case, prequantifiers, and discontinuous agreement in Russian. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 5, 91–138 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00161869
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00161869