1.4.5
Main features of the present proposal
The present analysis has points of contact with much of this work. Like casein-tiers theory, it exploits the relational character of structural case and the unmarked status of nominative case, without recourse to movement of casebearing elements or case features, or stranding and percolation of case features. Like GB, it exploits the distinction between morphosyntactic case and abstract Case, though defining abstract case configurationally at the level of Semantic Form rather than at D-Structure or S-Structure. A key move is to treat the two levels of case as formally analogous, and the relation between them as one of realization, rather like that between underlying and phonetic representations in phonology. Structural case at each level is defined in terms of prominence relations, and these prominence relations are articulated by means of two features which cross-classify the cases into natural classes. This theory makes it possible to relate the morphologically and syntactically motivated case system in [4] to a well-defined set of abstract cases by the interaction of independently motivated constraints.
1.5 1.5.1
Case theory The featural decomposition of case
The case theory sketched out in Kiparsky 1997 is designed to account for syntactic case marking and its relation to agreement and word order, for case morphology (e.g. patterns of neutralization and null affixation), for relationchanging (“A-movement”) processes such as passive, and in general for the relation between thematic roles and syntactic argument structure.7 Following Bierwisch and Wunderlich I assume that word meanings are propositional structures built from a fixed vocabulary of primitive constants and variables. Conceptual knowledge interfaces with syntactic structure at a level of Semantic Form where verbs are represented by expressions in which theta-roles are λ-abstractors over the variables in the function they denote (Bierwisch 1983, 1986, Bierwisch and Schreuder 1992). At Semantic form, the semantic role of the variable over which the lambda operator abstracts fixes the theta-role’s semantic content, and its depth of embedding fixes its place in the Thematic hierarchy. Structural case at all levels are defined by the cross-classifying relational features [±H(ighest) R(ole)] and [±L(owest) R(ole)].8 7 See
also Smith 1992/1996 for a development of an earlier version, and Wunderlich 1997, Joppen (this volume), Wunderlich & Lak¨ amper (this volume) for important related work. 8 This is comparable to the featural decomposition of grammatical functions by Bresnan & Kanerva 1989 and Alsina 1996 (respectively, [±r(estricted), ±o(bject)] and [±subj, ±obj]), building on Levin 1986. The features introduced here, however, are purely relational, and they apply also at the morphological level to define the inflectional case categories. The cross-
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