Following a long tradition of research on English case, this paper first outlines the phenomenon of canonical and non-canonical case assignment to pronouns functioning as heads or dependents, and then discusses some previous treatments in order to illustrate the data, as well as to demonstrate that a unified account capable of capturing all the generalisations has up until now remained elusive. A purely phrase-structural explanation will be sketched out and rejected, to be superseded by a model relying on the formalism of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which I argue successfully accounts for all the relevant syntactic patterns. The paper ends with a comparison between the present proposal and some earlier ideas in the literature. Finally, I briefly defend the claim that English pronouns still exhibit case distinctions.
The first part of this review article summarises and evaluates the contents of the book, attempting to do justice to the wealth of perspectives it offers. The book considers phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic features from the vantage points of approaches as diverse as typology, computational linguistics and formal theories like Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Minimalism. The second part of the article discusses several of the unifying threads that run through the volume, including the internal and cross-linguistic validity and correspondence of features, as well as the boundaries between morphology, syntax and semantics. I argue for a syntactic treatment of what has been referred to as periphrastic tense constructions in Bulgarian (including the future and the perfect), which I believe ensures greater language-internal and cross-linguistic consistency in proposing features and assigning their values. After briefly examining animacy in Bulgarian, I conclude that the operation and classification of features can make drawing boundaries between semantics and morphosyntax especially difficult. Finally, a case is made for treating tense as at least partly morphosyntactic in English, in contrast to prevalent current assumptions about the strictly morphosemantic nature of tense cross-linguistically.
This chapter examines the construction exemplified in the title, consisting of the singular determiner a followed by an adjective, a numeral, and a plural noun (abbreviated as AANN). Building on work by Dalrymple and King (2019), Hristov captures the syntactic structure and functional properties of this construction by assuming a standard NP analysis at constituent-structure, coupled with concord and index agreement within the NP at functional-structure. It is proposed that the numeral, which acts as a modifier, agrees with the plural concord of the head noun, while the determiner proper (the article) is exceptionally allowed to agree with the N′ string staggering ten dissertations in terms of index (singular when a single-unit reading is available). Thus, without altering the formal apparatus of LFG, this proposal has the advantage of explaining a number of previously unexplained contrasts and of being able to cover a wide range of related constructions.
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