Case and Agreement in Generative Grammar

273 Pages·2015·10.06 MB·English

Case and Agreement
in Generative Grammar
Part 1: History
Omer Preminger
University of Maryland – Department of Linguistics,
Maryland Language Science Center
The rise of case & agreement
(but mostly case)
A brief prologue
• In early generative grammar (e.g. Chomsky 1955/1975,
1957, 1965), attention was paid to some kinds of
morphology
➻ most notably, the verbal suffixes of English
("Affix Hopping")

• Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects (1965) also
included dedicated transformations for the transmission
of phi‑features across different categories in English
NB: "phi‑features" = {PERSON, NUMBER, GENDER/NOUN‑CLASS}
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• Chomsky (1957:112):
• Chomsky (1965:175):
[technically, not an agreement rule, but a nominal concord rule; we'll get back to this]
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• Question: Why even have a transformation for phi-feature
transmission?
➻ Couldn't we model phi-feature transmission via Phrase
Structure (PS) rules?
(Syn Struc; Chomsky 1957:29)
(cid:15482) Can you see the problem with this PS-rules solution?
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(GPSG; Gazdar, Klein, Pullum & Sag 1985:89)
• NB: We will see that there are rather clear empirical reasons to
reject even the “modularized” PS (sub‑)rule treatment of
agreement, as in GPSG.
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➻ But at this stage of the theory, plenty of morphology was
also flat out ignored…

• This is not intended as a criticism, of course; no scientific
investigation is expected to come up with a "Theory of
Everything" right from the start
• it is natural to abstract away from some properties,
while trying to explain the others
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(cid:15482) So how did agreement and, in particular, case
become "center stage" in generative linguistics?
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• Chomsky & Lasnik (1977): the [* NP V ] filter
inf
• there is a set of phenomena that look, at first glance, to
be completely heterogeneous —
‣ "Equi" (a.k.a. Control)
‣ prepositional complementizers
‣ Raising
‣ a select group of exceptional predicates (believe,
expect, consider, etc.)
• but they can be unified when we observe that they are
all repairs of the same potential violation
• cf.: "conspiracies" in phonology
(Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979)
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Case as licensing
• Jean-Roger Vergnaud (in a 1976 letter to C&L, responding
to a pre-pub ms. of Filters & Control):
• all of these repairs (except for Equi/Control...) have
something in common —
➻ they are the environments where one finds
(e.g. in Latin) accusative, rather than the expected
nominative, on the subject
(cid:15482) ... and thus was born the theory of Abstract Case
(Chomsky 1981 et seq.)
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