Phrase Structure Grammar
4.2 Case assignment
In Section 3.2.1.2, it was shown that the head in German and Spanish determines the form of its arguments. Concerning NPs, that means that the head nounassigns case to its arguments. Until now, this was formulated in AVMs as if the specific case information of the arguments were hard-wired in the head. Example (10) shows the relevant information of example (8) from Section 3.1.5. In (10), the head Gewinn ‘win’ licenses a complement NP which bears genitive case.
This is the view of case assignment proposed in Pollard and Sag (1994: 30). But such an account of case misses a very strong grammatical generalisation, namely
12There are more restrictions with respect to the pre-nominal genitives which will be accounted for in Section 4.6.
13There is in some varieties of Spanish a structure which allows a pre-nominal genitive. I will discuss this construction in Section 4.6.
(10) ⎡
val [comps ⟨NP[gen]⟩]
⎤⎥
the distinction betweenstructural andinherent case (sometimes also referred to as lexical case).14
Case is a grammatical category which some parts of speech (and phrasal types) bear. In some languages, for instance German as shown in Table 4.1, nouns and determiners are inflected for case, i.e. they are morphologically marked for case.
The following examples in (11) illustrate the morphological variation in German nouns, determiners, and pronouns according to the case they bear.
(11) a. {Er
he.nom/ Der
the.nom Patient}
patient.nom schläft.
sleeps
‘The patient / He sleeps.’
b. Robert Robert
hat has
{ihn
him.acc /den
the.accPatienten}
patient.acc angerufen.
called.
‘Robert has called him / the patient.’
c. Rita Rita
hat has
{ihm
him.dat / dem
the.dat Patienten}
patient.dat geholfen.
helped
‘Rita has helped him / the patient.’
d. Wir
the.gen Patienten}.
patient.gen
‘We remember him / the patient.’
In contrast to German, determiners and nouns in Spanish do not vary morpholog-ically as shown in Table 4.2. But regarding the pronominal system in Spanish, the morphological variation becomes conspicuous. As already mentioned, Spanish has two classes of pronouns, clitic pronouns and free pronouns. The clitic pronouns can only be either accusative or dative, and they show the morphological variation
14For an overview of case distinctions, see Blake (2001) and Haspelmath (2009).
(cf. (12b) and (12c)).15 The free pronouns, on the other hand, are marked syntac-tically for case with the dummy prepositions a ‘to’ in accusative16 and dative, and with de ‘of’ in genitive,17 while the nominative pronoun stays unmarked.
(12) a. {El the
doctor doctor
/ Él} he
duerme.
sleeps
‘The doctor / He sleeps.’
b. Roberto Roberto
locl.acc.sg.m ha has
llamado called
{a
to.accél him
/a
to.accel the doctor}.
doctor.
‘Roberto has called him / the doctor.’
c. Rita Rita
lecl.dat.sg.m ha has
ayudado helped
{a
to.dat él him
/ a
to.dat el the
doctor}.
doctor
‘Rita has helped him / the doctor.’
d. la the
llamada call
{de
of.gen él him
/ de-l
of-the.gen doctor} doctor
‘his / the doctor’s call’
Depending on the framework, this fact is modelled in different ways, and dif-ferent theoretical assumptions are made. In MGG, a universal principle named Case-Filter is postulated by which every NP which is phonetically realised – in HPSG terminology: its phon value is not empty – must bear case (cf. Chomsky, 1981: 49). This notion of case refers to the so-called abstract case (also named
“Case” with capital “C” in GB). That is to say, (abstract) case is understood as an abstract syntactic feature which licenses the phonetic appearance of NPs in a phrase. This notion of “Case” in MGG (since GB) refers to the syntactic distribu-tion of NPs in which Case is assigned, and not to the morphological form of the NPs (cf. Bobaljik and Wurmbrand, 2009: 44). The distributional notion of Case
15Free pronouns are normally used together with clitics. I will not go into the details of Spanish clitics, clitic left dislocation and clitic doubling, but for analyses of these phenomena, see Leonetti (2007) and Bildhauer (2007).
16In Spanish, the dummy preposition a ‘to’ in accusative only appears under specific semantic conditions. This phenomenon is known asdifferential object marking (cf. Bossong, 1982). See Machicao y Priemer (2014) for an analysis of the semantic factors.
17It is open to question whether Spanish marks nouns for genitive case. For the sake of the argument, I am assuming a genitive case marking here. See the arguments in Section 4.3.1 for the treatment of the preposition de‘of’ as a marker of genitive case in Spanish.
distinguishes between two sorts of case: structural and inherent case. Structural case is assigned in a specific (surface-structural) configuration, while inherent case is associated with theta-roles (cf. Chomsky 1981: 170 and Chomsky 1995: 114). For instance, it is very common to consider nominative and accusative as structural cases. Example (13) shows the active-passive alternation by which the notion of structural case can be exemplified.18
(13) a. Ralf
Ralf.nom schreibt writes
einen
a.accRoman. novel.acc
‘Ralf is writing a novel.’
b. Ein
a.nom Roman
novel.nom wird is
geschrieben.
written
‘A novel is being written.’
In MGG, it is assumed that the active sentence in (13a) and the passive sentence in (13b) share the same deep structure, only differing in their surface structures.
The distinction between both is due to transformations from the deep to the surface structure. In this way, MGG approaches try to explain the relation between (13a) and (13b), that is, that ein Roman bears the same theta-role (theme) in both sentences, but since structural case is assigned on the surface structure, and both sentences have a different surface structure ein Roman bears accusative in (13a), and nominative in (13b). In contrast, dative is analysed as inherent case, since a parallel transformation from dative to nominative does not hold as example (14b) shows.19
(14) a. Ralf
Ralf.nom schreibt writes
seinem
his.dat Vater
father.dat einen
a.acc Roman.
novel.acc
‘Ralf is writing a novel for is father.’
b. *Sein
his.nomVater
father.nom wird is
einen
a.accRoman
novel.accgeschrieben.
written
‘A novel is being written for his father.’ [intended reading]
18For further examples of structural case variation, for instance raising and control, see Haider (1985: 71).
19Some phrases bearing dative can be assigned nominative by virtue of the so-called Rezipi-entenpassiv ‘receiver-passive’ (also called dative-passive) in German. See for instance Haider (1986: 19–24); and Müller (2016b) for an HPSG analysis of this phenomenon. To which extent dative is (not) considered a structural case is a matter of discussion (cf. Haider, 1985: 65–67).
c. Ein
a.nom Roman
novel.nom wird is
seinem
his.dat Vater
father.dat geschrieben.
written
‘A novel is being written for his father.’
As mentioned above, the notion of case in HPSG in Pollard and Sag (1994: 30) assumes that for each argument of a head aspecificcase was hard-wired in the sub-catconstraints of the head. In order to account for the distinction between struc-tural and inherent/lexical20 case, a special case theory in HPSG emerged (cf. for instance Heinz and Matiasek 1994; Pollard 1994; Meurers 1999; Przepiórkowski 1999). Although both, the Case-Theory in MGG and in HPSG, are similar in that they assume a difference between structural and lexical case, they differ in one cru-cial point, namely what does it mean to be “structural”? For MGG, the question about structure, is a question which has to be answered in terms of competence leading to an approach aiming universality. On the other hand, HPSG does not try to give a universal answer, but one which aims at being descriptively adequate.
For (some) HPSG approaches, universality21 is something that could be achieved, but it is not the primary goal. Therefore, a case principle in MGG and HPSG does not (need to) have the same coverage; for HPSG at least not a priori, but it can be a welcome result a posteriori.
Now, since HPSG is a lexicalist theory, structural as well as lexical case, are as-signed “lexically”, and not in a specific position in a tree configuration (cf. Richter, 2000: 325–326). Nevertheless, which specific structural case is assigned, depends on the structural context in which the NP appears, as was shown by the examples in (13). Lexical case, however, is assigned idiosyncratically, i.e. the case-assigning head constraints the specificcasevalue its argument must bear in order to license
20Instead of the term inherent case, sometimes the term lexical case is preferred, since it is assumed that this kind of case marking is determined by the lexical head, while structural case marking is a matter of the structural context in which the NP appears (cf. Haider, 1985: 70–71).
Other terms also used for inherent/lexical case are idiosyncratic case (cf. Richter, 2000: 326) andinvariable case (cf. Haider, 1986: 9).
21The question of language universals is a very sensitive issue in linguistics which seems to have become a question of faith more than of science, with respect tobothpositions. I do notknowif there are any language universals, but I will neither preclude their existence nor assume them.
I think that it is important to have frameworks working on it, as well as others which do not assume them at all in order to be able to find them – if there are any. For some discussions on this topic see e.g. Evans and Levinson (2009) and the responses to their target article therein;
Sternefeld and Richter (2012); Müller (2016a: 431–487); a.o.
a grammatical structure, as was shown in example (14). It is worth mentioning that it is not possible to divide the set of cases into two non-intersecting subsets of
“structural” vs. “lexical cases”, neither language specifically and much less univer-sally. This would yield misleading interpretations of the notion of case and of case assignment in the literature, for instance in Chomsky (1981: 170) genitive is seen as structural, but in Chomsky (1995: 114) it is analysed as inherent. It is of great importance to distinguish case assignment between languages and also between phrasal types. Haider (1985: 80–81) considers, for instance, genitive in German as an instance of structural casefor NPs, butfor VPs (cf. example (15c)) as inherent – ‘invariant’ in his terminology (cf. Haider, 1986: 9). Furthermore, inside of Ger-man VPs (or of sentences) nominative and accusative are not always structural.
To illustrate that, the examples in (15) show (cf. the NPs in italics): an NP in lexical nominative (cf. (15a)), and an NP in lexical accusative (cf. (15b)).22 (15) a. Sein
his.nom Sohn
son.nom wird will
ein
an.nom großartiger
excellent.nomFrisör.
hairdresser.nom
‘His son will become an excellent hairdresser.’
b. Ralf
Ralf.nom hat has
denthe.acc ganzen
whole.acc Tag
day.acc einen
a.accRoman
novel.accgelesen.
read
‘Ralf has being reading a novel all day long.’
c. Wir
we.nom gedenken commemorate
der
the.gen Opfer.
victims.gen
‘We commemorate the victims.’
In order to account for these facts, the first tool in HPSG to distinguish between case forms is a type hierarchy of case as the one given in Figure 4.1 in which nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive are represented as lexical cases, and nominative, accusative, and genitive also as structural cases (cf. additionally Heinz and Matiasek 1994: 207 and Müller 2013a: 230).
The type hierarchy for case has case as the supertype which is divided into the single casesnom,acc,dat, andgen, and a further valuestructural-case(str), which is the supertype for structural cases. Every single case has a maximal subtype for
22As a marginal note: While in (15a) and (15c) nominative and genitive, respectively, can be considered aslexical cases strictly speaking, because the head must lexically determine which case these arguments bear, the termlexical case seems to be a misnomer for (15b) since it is not a property of thelexicalelementlesen ‘to read’ to assign this accusative, but rather of the temporal “construction”den ganzen Tag ‘all day long’.
case nom
lx nom
acc
lx acc
dat
lx dat
gen
lx gen
str
str gen
str na
str nom str acc
Figure 4.1: Type hierarchy for case
its corresponding lexical form (lx nom, lx acc, lx dat, and lx gen), since all cases can be used as lexical cases as well. Since nominative, accusative, and genitive can be assigned in structural contexts too – at least for German and Spanish – they have also structural subtypes, i.e. subtypes of str. Since for VPs, str nom and str acc are used as structural cases, they both have a supertype str na. For NPs, the only structural case needed in Spanish and German isstr gen.
A further instrument to capture the generalisation of case assignment is the so-called Case Principle (CaseP) which interacts with the type hierarchy for case given in Figure 4.1. The idea of the CaseP is that through this constraint it can be licensed which case the arguments must bear in cases of structural case.
This principle, for instance, accounts for the case alternation in active and passive shown in example (13), and as we will see later, also for the genitive assignment for arguments in NPs. In order to account for a device which assigns case according to specific structural contexts, some modifications in the feature geometry have been made.
Firstly, a new list valued argument-structure (arg-st) attribute has been brought up in the cat feature.23 A similar idea was brought by Pollard and Sag (1994: 376) with respect to the treatment ofsubcatafter introducing theval fea-tures. Thus,arg-stis to some extent parallel to the earliersubcatattribute, that is, it represents a list of all arguments of the head (cf. Sag and Godard 1994: 524;
Manning and Sag 1998: 107; Koenig 1999: 29; and Przepiórkowski 1999: 24–27).
23I am following Koenig (1999: 29) and considering arg-st as an attribute of cat and not of headas in Przepiórkowski (1999).
The elements of thearg-st list are normally the concatenation of the elements in the val attributes: subj, spr, and comps, but there is not an obligatory one-to-one representation between arg-st and val (cf. Bouma et al., 2001: 7). For instance, a difference betweenarg-st and val can be found in so-calledpro-drop languages like Spanish in which the subject argument is not necessarily realised.
In such cases, thepro element representing the subject is not included in thesubj list, since this list is used for syntactic complementation as defined at the beginning of Section 4, but it is nevertheless included in the arg-st list, since this argument is necessary for binding (cf. Manning and Sag 1998; Przepiórkowski 1999: 24–27;
and Bouma et al. 2001: 9–10).
As it is shown in example (16) for the German verb stem behandel- ‘treat’, the single elements of the vallists are structure-shared with the elements in the arg-st list.24
(16) ⎡
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎣
phon ⟨behandel-⟩
synsem|loc|cat
⎡⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎣
head [verb] val
⎡⎢
⎢⎢
⎢⎢
⎣
subj 1 ⟨NP[nom]⟩ comps 2 ⟨NP[acc]⟩
⎤⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎦ arg-st 1 ⊕ 2
⎤⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎦ word
⎤⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎥
⎥⎦
The elements of the arg-st list are normally ordered according to the Acces-sibility Hierarchy (cf. (17), sometimes called Obliqueness Hierarchy) proposed in Keenan and Comrie (1977) which has been proved to be very useful for independent linguistic phenomena such as passive, relative clauses, binding, extraction, etc.25
24Structure sharing between the elements of thevalattributes and of thearg-stcan be achieved either by a general principle calledArgument Realisation Principle(cf. Bildhauer, 2007: 14–15) which maps the elements in thevallists to the elements in thearg-stin a specific order, or it can be solved by constraints on types of lexical classes, since, for instance, direct and indirect objects of verbs can show distinct degrees of obliqueness, see for instance Footnote 25. See Section 4.3.1.2 for more details on the mapping betweenarg-standval.
25With respect to the ordering of direct and indirect object, other proposals have been made, for instance the ordering Indirect Object > Direct Object for specific verb classes. See the discussion in Müller (2013a: 45–46). It is noteworthy that this ordering does not (need to)
(17) Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan and Comrie, 1977: 66)
Subject >Direct Object > Indirect Object >Oblique Object >Genitive >
Object of Comparison
A second modification in the feature geometry concerns the type of the single elements in thesubj,spr,comps, and arg-stlists. Until now, they were treated as objects of type synsem. Since raising is one of the decisive contexts for struc-tural case assignment (cf. example (18)),26 it is necessary to mark these objects as raised or not raised. Example (18a) shows the subject of the verb schlafen ‘sleep’
in nominative, but in example (18b) the same subject has been raised to the su-perordinate VP and gets its case from the susu-perordinate verb sehen ‘see’ which embedsschlafen. Since the subject is marked as bearing structural case, it can get nominative in (18a), but only accusative in (18b).
(18) a. Er
he.nom schläft.
sleeps
‘He is sleeping.’
b. Ich
I.nom sehe see
ihnhim.acc schlafen.
sleep
‘I see him sleeping.’
In the new feature geometry (cf. AVM (19)), the elements of the val lists are of type argument (arg) which are defined as having two attributes argument (arg) and raised(rsd); argis of type synsem and rsd of type bool. That is to say, arguments which are realised locally – e.g. the subject of schlafen in (18a) – are marked as “rsd −”, and if they are not realised locally – e.g. the subject of schlafen in (18b) – then they are marked as “rsd +” (cf. Przepiórkowski 1999: 93 and Richter 2000: 329–330).27 As mentioned above, the elements of the val lists are structure-shared with the elements of the arg-st list, therefore, they must be elements of the same type.
reflect the linear constituent order. See also Fries (1997: 51–59) for a discussion about the hierarchical ordering of cases in German.
26For instance in AcI constructions, see Reis (1976); Haider (1985); Meurers (1999: 179–181);
Przepiórkowski (1999); a.o.
27Przepiórkowski (1999: 78) first proposed an attribute realized. Here, I am assuming his later proposal of the attribute raised instead. See Przepiórkowski (1999: 93) and Meurers (1999: 199–200) for further discussion on both attributes.
(19) ⎡⎢
Now with the type hierarchy for case in Figure 4.1, and the new feature geometry in AVM (19), it is possible to capture the generalisation with respect to structural case assignment, as postulated in the CaseP.28
(20) Case Principle (CaseP)
a. In an arg-st list of a verbal head,
i. the first not-raised element of the list with structural case receives nominative (str nom),
ii. and all further not-raised elements of the list with structural case receive accusative (str acc).
b. In an arg-st list of a nominal head,
i. all not-raised elements of the list with structural case receive genitive (str gen).
Thus, the CaseP is divided into a clause for verbal heads (cf. (20a)), and a clause for nominal heads (cf. (20b)), since – as mentioned above – structural cases for VPs are nominative and accusative, and genitive for NPs – at least for German and Spanish. Moreover, the CaseP is formulated in such a way that case is assigned with respect to the elements in thearg-st list and not to the elements in the val lists. Case assignment as well as other phenomena (e.g. active-passive alternation, binding phenomena, etc.) are not related to the elements in the val attributes, but to the elements in the arg-st list (cf. Meurers, 1999: 203).29 Furthermore,
28For different formulations of the CaseP, see Heinz and Matiasek (1994: 208–211); Meurers (1999: 204); Müller (1999: 278); Przepiórkowski (1999: 93–94); Müller (2016a: 278); a.o.
29Furthermore, so-calledpro-drop languages like Spanish do not necessarily realise their subject argument. Thus, theproelement representing the subject is not included in the subjlist, but
the single constraints (cf. (20a-i), (20a-ii), and (20b-i)) refer tonot-raised elements (cf. Przepiórkowski, 1999: 77), since raised elements get their case assignment from their new host (cf. example (18)). Thus, the CaseP assigns nominative to the first not-raised element in the arg-st list of a verb, and accusative for the following ones; but genitive to all elements of the arg-st list of a noun.
The formalisation of the CaseP as an implicational constraint can be seen in (21).
The formalisation of the CaseP as an implicational constraint can be seen in (21).