January 15, 2012

Nguyen 1

Quick Primer on Morphological Case

1. English nouns have case! (1) English pronouns English pronouns show nominative and accusative case morphology. Other pronouns and nouns do not. a. b. c. d. He saw the dog *Him saw the dog The dog saw him *The dog saw he

analysis, all English nouns have nominative and accusative case morphology, which is usually the same for both nominative and accusative case. In other words, English nouns have case, but there is no visible difference between the forms for each case. 2. Morphological case and structural Case (3) Passives in English In an active construction, the direct object shows accusative case morphology. The passive construction is a transformation based on the active construction in which the direct object becomes the subject and shows nominative case. a. b. c. The dog saw him He was seen (by the dog) *Him was seen (by the dog)

(2) The case in Russian Most Russian nouns show case morphology. However, Russian also has indeclinable nouns, which do not show case morphology. a. b. c. d. vidit main-u sees car-ACC vidit kenguru sees kangaroo unitoenie main-y destruction car-GEN unitoenie kenguru destruction kangaroo

(4) Passives in Icelandic Icelandic passive constructions function like passive constructions in English. However, Icelandic features a phenomenon called quirky case. a. b. c. d. eir luku kirkjunni they finished the-church.DAT Vi vitjuum Olafs we visited Olaf.GEN Kirkjunni var loki the-church.DAT was finished Olafs var vitja Olaf.GEN was visited

When an adjective appears with an indeclinable noun, the adjective shows the case morphology that the indeclinable noun should have received. e. f. vidit krasiv-uju kenguru sees beautiful-ACC kangaroo unitoenie krasiv-oj kenguru destruction beautiful-GEN kangaroo

We can analyze Russian indeclinable nouns as nouns that have case morphology, but this case morphology is the same for all cases. Under a similar

The passive construction examples (4c) and (4d) still show genitive and dative case when we expect nominative case instead. Because of this quirky behavior in the passive construction, genitive and dative cases are quirky cases.

January 15, 2012

Nguyen 2

Quirky case is paint on a noun that obscures an underlying structural case, which in this (4c) and (4d) would be nominative case. We often refer to structural case as Case. All other cases, including quirky case, are (morphological) case. The structural Cases are nominative and accusative. Other cases such as dative and genitive are morphological cases, which are just morphological paint on a noun that has underlying structural Case. Typically, in nominative-accusative languages, morphological case paints over structural accusative Case.